These Boots Ain’t Made for Walking
ROD WEBB
We’ve all seen deathly pale elderly people lying on the pavement waiting for an ambulance. As we get older, it might evoke the thought that ‘There but for the grace of God go I’.
Two months ago, I was one of these elderly people lying on the ground with concerned faces peering down at me. Apart from the pain, what I remember most was trying to explain that it was “My boots!” I suppose I was trying to convey that it was not age and infirmity (or alcohol) that had caused the accident.
Once the doctors at the Conquest had relocated my dislocated shoulder, my next thought was Fat Tuesday. I wasn’t going to miss the annual Saturday Unplugged for anything, especially as I had old college friends coming down for the day.
This wasn’t a good idea as I should have been resting, and after a week or so of pretending nothing had happened, I succumbed to the shock, lack of sleep and the realisation that the damaged nerves really were going to take a year to mend.
It took several weeks to get over that black period, but once I had, thoughts turned back to those boots. I started by looking up speed lace hooks and found that Buckler Boots had set up a campaign some years ago called Sling those hooks to get speed laces banned.
I then started talking to anyone I saw who was either wearing boots that might have speed lacing or just random people that I bumped into. I was astonished by the number of people who had experienced a fall or near fall caused by the hooks, including my own daughter. The critical factor appeared to be the environment in which it happened: I’d been walking quickly downhill pulling with one hand a trolley loaded with newspapers, whereas one woman I spoke to had just arrived home with her shopping – and she’d had to bunny hop into her house before sitting down and untangling them.
I’ve probably talked to 20 people who have boots with similar fasteners, and everyone has experienced at least one incident. So I feel I have a duty to warn people. Although falling over when your boots get tangled might just be irritating, or even funny, if you don’t hurt yourself, in the wrong set of circumstances they could be fatal.
Going back to the incident itself, I have to pay tribute to all the people who helped: Dan the care worker, who was first on the scene and called an ambulance, gave me a coat to keep warm and stayed throughout; Chris, who drove my car home to save me getting a parking ticket; Khalil who gave advice and support; Bonjour café who stored my trolley; the kind lady who got me a sleeping bag; the very attentive ambulance crew, the doctors that yanked my arm back with the help of morphine; my wife who endured hours at the hospital and all the fallout; and anyone else I have forgotten to mention.
For more tales of tangled
mishaps visit buckbootz.com/news/sling-those-hooks
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