There’s no business like shoe business... (From Bournemouth Echo)

There’s no business like shoe business...

7:00pm Wednesday 19th November 2008

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Have you ever wondered how on earth some of things you see in the road end up there?

The odd battered teddy bear I can understand – little Johnny (or, more likely, Jemima) is being pushed along in the pushchair when poor old Ted drops to the floor, and Mummy doesn’t notice. Fair enough.

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But shoes? I say shoes when of course I mean shoe, singular, because it seems to be one of the most common sights on roads, any roads, all over Britain.

Just this morning, as I was driving into work along Wimborne Road, I spotted, smack bang in the middle of the road, a perfectly clean, smart modern brogue shoe, of about a size nine or 10, sat all on its own with no apparent motive for its being there.

What on earth sort of scenario leads to a smart young man’s fairly new shoe ending up there, in the middle of a dirty road? I mean, when was the last time you were walking along and one of your shoes fell off? And you DIDN’T stop to pick it up and put it back on?

It’s not as if it’s something you wouldn’t notice, losing your shoe.

But it seems to happen so often. And they’re never in pairs, just the one, poor little abandoned twin, ruined forever, well before its prime.

There has to be an answer to this conundrum. Someone somewhere must have lost a shoe in public and know the answer to this mystery… My imagination has come with all sorts of theories, the most likely of which is “friends” nicking footwear and winging it out of a moving car window – though why that would be funny, and quite so regularly, is beyond me.

The most interesting theory, though, is that alien abductions really do happen, and actually take on a far less scientific modus operandi than previously thought.

A little spaceship hovers over the chosen victim, out pops the little green man, with an ankle clasp he must attach to the poor human, in order to hoik he or she up and away by the leg.

In order to do this, one of the victim’s shoes must be removed (and, subsequently, abandoned).

And there we have it. Mystery solved.

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