The dictionary definition of hell is ‘a spiritual realm of evil and suffering’ — but, in my opinion, this description of a fiery netherworld of perpetual misery is feeble and inaccurate.
It was obviously written by someone who had never been back-to-school shoe shopping, someone who had not endured the desperate distress and exhaustion of a frazzled mother, reaching peak body temperature, alongside a contrary, monosyllabic teenage girl in the middle of a shop more crowded than a Beyonce concert.
The machine that dispenses your ticket number for the shoe queue should dispense double doses of Valium, and a Men In Black-style guard should be on the door wiping your memory as you leave so that you forget this hideous experience — because you are going to have to do it again and again every year until your offspring leave school. This, my friends, is truly purgatory.
When they sentence diabolical criminals, they shouldn’t send them to prison, they should sentence them to a lifetime of school shoe shopping.
Teenage girls who nurture the fantasy of early motherhood should be made to do this, and Bond villains, who deserve to be tortured, should be forced to wrestle a tantruming toddler who finally agrees to try on one shoe before removing the rest of their clothing in an illogical protest against being made to wait hours in the volcanic heat of a High Street shopping mall.
I had thought it would get easier as they got older and, indeed, there is a slightly less stressful lull between the ages of seven and 11 when it doesn’t make you feel like running for the hills and joining the circus, and only one bottle of medicinal gin is required afterwards, but actually it gets harder as they hit teenage years.
‘I am not even trying those on,’ my 12-year-old told me sternly at least 2,000 times this Saturday as we walked ever so slowly around the shops at pre-teen wandering pace.
‘Why do you keep picking pointy elf shoes for me?’ she asked again and again, confusing me so much I handed her a pair of stuffy sheepskin slippers at one point.
I bit my tongue, held my breath and plotted my new life on a remote Greek island, while watching her incompetently undo her trainer lace with her left hand as she tried to text a friend on her phone with the other.
This painfully slow process drove me to the outer edges of mental instability, especially as the incredulous shop assistant wouldn’t believe Gracie-in-the-middle is a size eight shoe.
‘But she’s only 12,’ the ten-year-old girl serving us kept repeating. Resisting the urge to say: ‘I know, freaky, right? And her shoe size is the least unusual thing about her,’ I had to keep handing back size sevens politely asking for a size up.
Another mum of four has bought herself a foot measure she keeps at home to check sizes before going to the shops — a sanity-saving move I will copy next year.
At one point, well into our shoe shopping debacle, Gracie and I got into a physical tussle over the perfect pair of flat black shoes. ‘Wrong size,’ she said, triumphantly.
No, they are not,’ I replied desperately and she apologised after checking the number inside. But these shoes were a ‘small size eight’, if such a thing isn’t an oxymoron. She rolled her eyes.
‘Mum, I just wasted an apology on you,’ she added with the kind of teen logic that is so helpful on a shopping trip. My hair started to fall out by this point.
They say your children only get to know you as a person when they become a teenager; that’s when they begin to see you as something other than a mum, a woman in your own right.
God help them if this bit of the growing up process begins in the John Lewis shoe department on the first weekend of September because I was not my best adult self in front of my offspring.
Our Cinderella moment happened at around 5pm when a pair of clumpy leather brogues materialised to end my ordeal.
There’s a Coco Chanel quote that goes something like: ‘A woman with good shoes is never ugly.’ Well, I’d like to update this quote alongside my update of the definition of hell: ‘A teenage girl with ugly shoes is always grumpy.’
Next year, Mr Candy is on shoe duty.
Daily Mail