TRADITION

Alpargatas — the Holiday Fling I Always Go Back To

How the perfect footwear transports me to a cyclical summer idyll

You can have any colour or size you like. But only one design. (Photo: Eusebio Perdiguero, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

I first went abroad on holiday at the age of ten, to France. Anticipating perpetual heat and sunshine, my mum bought me my first pair of flip-flops as the ideal beachside option. Not something I’d ever worn in gloomy, drizzly England, but I had my first stamp in my first passport, my first bout of sea sickness on the cross-Channel ferry — a footwear first seemed in keeping with the spirit of overseas adventure.

We were right about the heat and sunshine — like nothing I’d experienced before. Magnificent, but overwhelming. As for the suitability of the flip-flops, we couldn’t have been more wrong. The specific sequencing of my toes, with too wide a gap between ‘big’ and ‘the one that’s supposed to be right next to ‘big’, to hold the plastic thong securely in place’ meant that they slipped and slid where they should have flipped and flopped.

And every time they slipped and slid, they scraped an abrasive slurry of sand and seawater around the delicate, hitherto unexposed furrow of skin between my tootsies. I don’t recall what colour the offending flip-flops were, but my toes were most definitely red raw by day two. Replacement shoreline footwear was called for…