Dialogue: Footwear to run from Christmas

It's Christmas. Raise the drawbridge, drop the portcullis, nail the letterbox shut and draw the curtains. But it's no good. Christmas gets through. Only today an electronic Christmas card slid into my computer, starring a snowman and a sledge and a poem of greetings beside which Al Gore's concession speech seemed a model of sincerity.

The dogs and I flee daily to the hills for long meditative Scrooge-meets-Wordsworth walks. But then some fool in the pub tells me I shouldn't. Why? I ask. Grass seeds, he says. Phooey, I say with emphasis on the f, but nevertheless I listen.

Apparently I'm endangering the dogs. Grass seeds can lodge between the pads of a dog's paw where all is dark and damp and composty and having lodged there they can sprout and wreak horrible damage. What sort of damage? I ask.

Use your imagination, he says. Phooey, I say again, but while it's perfectly all right, indeed admirable, to say phooey to a bloke in the pub, you can't say phooey to the imagination.

Well, you can, but it's about as effective as saying "stay" to my little black mongrel. Neither she nor my imagination ever attended obedience classes. Give my imagination a horror scene to play with and it's like a mongrel in a chicken coop.

So the mind conjures images of grass seeds lodging in paws and sprouting and sending shoots up the inside of my dogs' legs.

The shoots follow the paths of the veins, drawing sustenance from the marrow, silent and insidious, blindly driving upwards towards the light, until suddenly they burst alien-like from the dogs' backs. The dogs yelp with a suffering I can only alleviate with a mower.

But I have told my imagination to sit and, though it has continued to whine, I have ignored it. Up the hills once more we go for the joy that is in them.

The warm, wet spring has done wonders for the grass. It is more than dog deep. The dogs bound through it like furry dolphins. When they stand still they disappear.

Meanwhile, I sneeze along behind them through the wake of allergenic pollen.

My dogs have both been fixed and so lead an enviable existence from which the main source of expense and misery has been excised by a scalpel. I wish someone would spay the grass. Its reproductive weaponry is formidable.

Here are seeds like spears, and seeds like arrow-heads, and sticky seeds and seeds with hooks on and, above all, there are little bullet seeds with a pair of pointed ends.

But the man in the pub was wrong. The dogs are fine and dandy. It's me that is under attack. The seeds pierce my clothing, gather in trouser cuffs, stick in hair, mass in shoes and sink into socks. How they manage it I don't know, but the bullet seeds in particular know how to burrow into socks like moles of malice.

And having burrowed, they scratch. They scratch wickedly and irresistibly. I weigh 13 stone, and a seed weighs next to nothing, but it brings me down. I sit, remove my shoe, remove my sock, remove the seed, replace the sock, replace the shoe, stand up and the seed's still there.

When I get home, I try washing the socks but seeds scoff at such feebleness. They're as persistent as Christmas.

So it was yesterday that the seeds took me to horrorville. Off to the shopping mall I drove, where I found a convenient car park in little under an hour.

Christmas comes in two forms. First, there's the frantic worship at the temple of commerce, all grim-faced grief and humming Eftpos. Then there's the equally ghastly weak-kneed vicarage stuff, which is also to be found in the shopping mall in the form of a plastic infant in a flame-proof manger radiating peace and goodwill, which are instantly belied by one glance at the revellers with shopping trolleys.

Shunning the giant synthetic Christmas tree crowned with some sort of electrical bird which squawked as I passed, I sought out the shoe shop. I want, I said to the frazzled girl, a pair of shoes that are rugged enough to climb hills, that can be worn without socks and that do not collect grass seeds.

I thought my demands would defeat her but she led me gently by the hand to a display of the sort of shoes that as a youth one vowed never to buy.

Ranged before me were a hundred pairs of the strappy brown sandals such as are worn by chemists on holiday, disciples in 19th-century oil paintings and people who shouldn't wear shorts but do.

"There you go," she said, "Jesus boots."

I bought two pairs - to run away from Christmas in.