Rejoice! It’s a 3 and a half E!

Friday November 25th 2011

Over the years, while in their respective buggies, Ed and Sam have dropped off many a mitten, hat and shoe onto the ground. It may, at the time, escape my attention but when I get round to noticing, it will usually get retrieved. A member of the public may catch up with me and hand them over with sympathetic comments over the prospect of having to buy a new pair of pricey toddler shoes. If a longer period of time passes, I’ve retraced my steps and found them placed on a wall or bench. They’ve seemed to have found their way back in the way of these cats you hear about who intuitively track their way back to old haunts from a great distance. A recent wooly hat was found on some nearby railings, several days on. I put it in the wash and Sam is back to wearing (and dropping) it again.

The expectation that that it all gets recovered came to a juddering halt today. Sam had shaken loose a shoe at some point when we were bringing Ed back from school. I retraced my steps against the tide of departing children and their parents. Surely by a school, someone who found it would know what to do. I surveyed the nursery area and the now deserted school yard. I enquired in the general office. Then I returned to the street and did it all over again looking closely at those collected dunes of fallen leaves which shared the same brown and orange colours as Sam’s shoes. ‘Never mind being so arty farty staring at those leaves – get your boys out of the cold’, I could almost hear a Northern voice saying. Perhaps some rascal of a boy had lobbed it in a garden. We went home.

So when on Saturday November 26th 2011 , Jan and Sam went to the shoe shop to get a replacement pair of shoes, I was hoping with all hope, that he would have had to step up a shoe size which would have made getting a new pair of shoes a necessity in a parallel universe. It was getting dark when they had come back. The door opened and I looked intently on the new shoes that Sam was wearing as he came bounding in. They looked like they may be bigger. Jan confirmed that he was into new size territory. Just. That 3E result brought greater relief than City’s 1-0 win over Forest.