My DM black 10-hole 1490s

These are some of my oldest boots, dating back probably to the 1990s.  You can't see in that photo, but it was around the time that Doc Martens started coming out with the logo embossed on the outside leather at the top of the boot.  Still made in England in those days, which qualifies them as vintage and new equivalent ones now cost I believe somewhere in the region of £200!  I used to wear them a lot on the bike - mainly when I couldn't be bothered to lace up my 14-hole ones - although they're not steel-toe ones so I'm probably lucky I never fell off it wearing them.  If you look closely at the toe area of the left boot you can see the "bald" patch where the gearchange has rubbed the surface off the leather.

 

 

Here I am wearing them in my favourite way, with black skinny jeans tucked into my boots.  The laces are now a bit the worse for wear so instead of bothering to get some new ones, I've simply laced up just the bottom 8 holes, though I normally prefer to wear my Docs fully laced right to the top.

 



 
Looking pretty muddy in that last photo, as it had been raining almost every day the week I took the pictures, but I shan't bother cleaning them: I love my DMs to have that lived-in look.  I don't wear these particular ones anywhere near as often as I used to, but they're still as amazingly comfy as well-worn Doc Marten boots always are! 

20-hole Underground Rangers

So... I've spent most of the last couple of weeks laced up in my new 20-hole Rangers: "new" in the sense that I bought them off eBay a month or so ago.  Although the winning bid as I recall was £72, I traded in a load of Nectar points, and thus got them virtually half-price!  They're really nice boots, and I've been wearing them with long footie socks and shorts to display them to full advantage:

 

 

But since it was a nice morning, a little imprudently I wore them taking the dog for her weekly walk in the woods and managed to get them covered in mud, the result of an exceptionally wet winter and early spring this year.  Eek!

 

 

 

I was more than a little apprehensive at the prospect of possibly having trashed them, but I wore them in the shower (!) to rinse them off thoroughly and they came up good as new.  I guess the previous owner had cared for them and polished them well, but whatever the reason, they've turned out to be really robust boots and still look fantastic.  They do take a little while to put on, because I like my boots laced up fully right to the tops, but the effort is worth it! Well, I think so, anyway...



 

 

 

  

How I got started in boots

I love boots!  So here, I'm going to write about lots of the ones I own... tall boots, lace-ups, Doc Martens (of course), Rangers, New Rocks and a few wellies thrown in for good measure.  With photos, of course.  And where better to start than with what got me going in the first place!

One of my earliest childhood memories is of one boiling hot summer's day when I was eight, going on nine, putting on my father's big hobnailed army boots and sitting around in my bedroom in them: I must have been absolutely roasted! My mother came in, took a horrified look and told me to take them off, thinking I'd gone mad. Luckily I escaped getting punished for it, and I never did find out whether she told my father what I'd been doing.

When I was eleven I went one better! On the top floor of the rambling old house we lived in at the time there was a boxroom in which I discovered one day two pairs of my father's old army motorcycle boots. I put on the black ones which were a size 7, so they weren't that much too big for me, and I loved the way the thick leather came all the way up my legs to my knees. I had a playroom in the room just next door, and I used to wear these boots undisturbed for many a happy hour up there - undiscovered but with the thrill of doing something naughty. I don't know what happened to them, but one day when I went to look, they weren't there anymore. I guess my father must've had a clear-out or something.

Sadly that put paid to my boot wearing activities for a while. We weren't allowed to wear boots to school, so I knew my mother wouldn't buy me any of my own, and I could hardly ask her, given the reason I wanted them! So I had to wait until I'd grown up, had my own money and could buy what I wanted with it. In fact, by one of odd those quirks of fate, I got a motorbike in 1979 and thus got a pair of motorcycle boots of my very own after all. Not only that, for most of my adult life, I've worn boots of one sort or another: even now I tend to wear them in preference to shoes pretty much all the time.

I can certainly trace it all back to that hot day as a boy when I tried my father's on, but I can't help feeling there may be something even further back, earlier in my childhood, buried deep in my subconscious, for boots to have held and retained such an attraction and fascination for me all these years.

And to start it all off in suitable style, here are the awesome 20-hole Underground Rangers I was wearing at the weekend (complete with footie socks and shorts)...