Two poor soles walk into a bar…

It finally happened this weekend, as a dozen patch-up jobs ran their course. There may have been more of my own glue and metal added to these over the years than what they left the factory with.

But now after 8 years of solid use – these sandals are without a doubt totally screwed!

The screws I added last year had a habit of digging into the flesh of the right foot. Sometimes you could almost pretend that a feather was tickling there, but no, it was cold hard steel. Ever stick a toothpick into your gums because it kind of hurt but felt good? Yeah like that.

Do you also find it difficult to throw away old familiar things sometimes, especially when they’ve found a place in your life for years and years? Keep nursing it along until one day you realise there is not that much left of what you started with. I trod in these sandals over hundreds of kilometers, from Melbourne beaches to the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. From Port Elizabeth in South Africa (ps chicken is the tastiest there), to the weird prison for civets being farmed to shit out coffee in Bali. These sandals have seen it all. And now we must say goodbye, for now.

My well-travelled leather and rubber friends are being slowly turned back into soil. Another 5 years maybe and a trapped seed (there have enough cracks to hold a desk of playing cards) will grow into something wide and comfortable to rest my feet upon. Who knows, there might be a coffee seed in there still from Bali and I’ll make the Kopi luwak myself!