Advice for a newbie

During my primary school years, my mother, bless her, was still locked in her drug-addled summer-of-love days - for some reason she'd remained hippy and dippy way into the early 80s when most of her friends had sobered up and settled down. When I knew her she was smitten with some Californian shoe-designer - one of those cringing dudes who talks a good game and has a way with the ladies that no man can understand. She bought into his ideas for a new type of kid's shoe, which was the result of years of ergonomic design research and a real orthapaedic knowledge gained through Med school training, all filtered through the vast array of hallucinogens he was imbibing.

The result? I had to wear one of four prototype pairs of these godawful shoes to school - for three terms straight. My mother eventually tired of the Shoe Nut and saw him for what he really was - a loathesome little oik who masqueraded as a troubled genius - but only after I had had the piss ripped out of me by everyone at my school, including teachers, dinner ladies and deputy head, for a solid year. I wore those shoes because I loved my mom - and in wearing them to test their comfort, durability and aid to growth I was helping her do what she could to help the man she was in love with, and in this way I was making her happy. But eventually I could stand to wear them no more and, in the ensuing rows at home, the Shoe Nut's frenzied rages at my refusal to publicise his product among the kids of the neighbourhood betrayed the first signs of his overindulgence in mind-expanders. My mom dumped him at the start of the summer recess. She threw the shoes out after him onto the street, and all the kids on the stoop cheered.

That was the last time I ever bowed to other people's ideas of what I should wear.