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)...