Cold Feet

In the early hours of this morning, before going to bed, I went out into the street to put some rubbish in the bin. The snow was still gently falling and the street was asleep under a blanket several inches deep. There's something about the silence of a snowy night, that muffled silence that one can almost hear and so I stood and drank it all in, I had the whole world all to myself. I must of stood like that for several timeless minutes before I noticed the footprints. Obviously there were lots of footprints of all sizes and shapes from the sharp well defined heels of office shoes to the somewhat squished toes of too large Wellingtons, but the ones that seized my attention were unmistakeable - the clear imprint of naked human feet. Now my shock at encountering them was a pale shadow of that experienced by Robinson Crusoe in his lonely discovery of something similar, but nonetheless it certainly gave me pause. Someone had definitely been padding about the street in bare feet. Footstep by footstep I followed the trail with my eyes until at last they rested upon two, large, somewhat blue feet , shiny and sparkling from melted snow....and sticking out of the legs of my trousers.

It's been some time since my feet and I had anything approaching a conversation. The nerves connecting them to my central nervous system long ago gave up the fight against scar tissue and calcification and they became large pink strangers that flapped about at the end of fairly useless legs BUT you would think, wouldn't you, that if they found themselves submerged in snow, in sub zero temperatures, they might just make an effort to mention it. Not these guys, no, they know how to sulk. They'd rather stand there going blue and let their toes drop off than deign to address me.