I was walking through Stadtpark in a blinding snowstorm today in my very warm and very comfortable Boss Orange coat.
The Duck Pond is nearly frozen over but there is an area right around the edge where the Ducks can paddle.
Usually when it reaches this stage Duckman comes along and breaks the ice with a stick so that the Ducks always have some water. I sometimes speak to Duckman but he does not much like conversation or company. He mainly just likes Ducks and sits and watches them for hours.
I bet you are wondering why I was wandering through Stadtpark in a blinding Snowstorm.
A couple of weeks ago we went shopping for coats and boots. Now Cate has cupboards full of coats and boots but I have discovered that a girl can never have too many coats or boots. There is always another coat or pair of boots needed for a particular purpose.
If I say something like ‘Why don’t you wear those boots you bought in London last month?’ Cate will say something like ‘Oh no they would not be suitable at all – what I need is (insert a type of boot that she does not have – and there are millions).
But of course I do not say things like that because there would be no point. When Cate says that she needs to go and buy coats and boots I saddle up, pack my beef jerky and water bottle and prepare for the ordeal ahead.
So we found these boots in a shop in the Wollzeile but they were a teensy bit small so the Italian lady said that she would put them ‘in the machine’ and enlarge them one size.
I picked them a few days later and a few days after that Cate tried them on.
I became aware of this hubbub coming from the bedroom. From a low drone it rose to a crescendo.
Well apparently she could not get them on her feet. They were much smaller than when she tried them on in the shop. They had certainly not been enlarged. They felt like they had been en-smalled. She will never fall for a trick like that again. What a waste of (an astonishingly large amount of) money this was. Why is she so gullible as to believe that a machine could enlarge boots that are too small in the first place?
This tirade went on for some considerable time. It seem like hours.
Then the killer blow!
‘This is your fault! I knew you were unhappy and desperate to get out of the shop so I only bought them to make you happy!’
What?
I vaguely recall sitting there staring vacantly into space dribbling or possibly playing Angry Birds. I usually lapse into some form of catatonic state in shoe shops and am not a burden to anyone – least of all to my precious loved one.
I was there to buy boots. Sure I do not like buying boots but I was on a mission to do so and was seized with that purpose. Indeed I was determined not to leave without boots because then the excruciating process would just be repeated the following week.
Oh the cruelty and unfairness of that statement.
I did the only thing I could in the circumstances and offered to fix the problem by enlarging the boots. I would do this by employing the exceedingly cunning plan of buying a pair of boot enlargers. These are things that you put in boots and then expand them to stretch the leather. The leather stretches and after a period of time – perhaps a few days – stays stretched.
This mollified my lovely and she may have forgiven me for my appalling and thoughtless behavior in the shoe store. She has gone to Jakarta today anticipating larger boots when she returns.
The problem was to find the boot stretchers. I thought I knew where to do this hence my journey through the snowstorm. Alas I failed. So I have called once more on Mr Amazon and as I write some boot stretchers will be winging their way to Vienna.
I am trying not to think about what will happen if they do not work.
