Truly, the end-of-year party season must be upon us here in my corner of Malindi. I say this not because the volume at the bar across the street from me has gone up; in fact, it has not, not really.
Is it because there seems to be far more tourists, domestic and foreign, driving around in tour vans and taking selfies on the beach? There are, but that is not why I believe the season of merrymaking is here.
I am saying this because, on my regular early morning walk around the town, I have noticed more and more abandoned single shoes and sandals along my path.
Please bear with me before you dismiss this article as the ramblings of one who is a few bottles short of a full crate of beer.
In the Cinderella story, a magical fairy godmother provides Cinderella with a beautiful dress and glass slippers for a royal ball. As the magic fades at midnight, Cinderella flees, accidentally leaving one glass slipper behind on the palace stairs. The prince then uses the slipper to find its owner, searching the kingdom until he finds Cinderella, for whom the slipper fits perfectly, leading to her happily ever after.
From the evidence, I deduce that many parties are going on and that both male and female Cinderella types have discovered there is no Prince or Princess Charming sufficiently interested to reunite them with their missing footwear.
The only other logical conclusion is that more people than usual are being hit by cars. I mention car accidents because we all know the weirdly unscientific fact that, in road accidents, when a pedestrian is hit by a car, you will invariably notice that the victim has lost a shoe, if not both. If you do not believe me, ask people who have been at accident scenes.
I have heard it said that a shoe falls off a person’s foot in an accident because “the sudden, intense force of the impact overcomes the friction and force holding the shoe on, causing the shoe to accelerate faster than the foot and come off”.
Apparently, this can happen to one or both shoes, and it is often an indicator of severe injury due to the magnitude of force required to dislodge them. Perhaps if I had paid more attention in physics class at school, I might have been better able to explain this phenomenon. For now, you will just have to take my word for it.
Anyway, the abandoned shoes and sandals, all single by the way, that I have been seeing on my daily perambulation do not appear to have been left behind by accident victims.
It would appear that most of the footwear I have seen has been left behind by revellers with a Cinderella complex. Unless there has been a spate of abductions by space aliens in Malindi.
However, there has been no evidence of any car accidents or alien abductions on my daily route. Yet I keep coming across abandoned items of footwear in some of the oddest parts of town.
There was a single sandal abandoned on the outside perimeter of the Muslim cemetery in Shela on Friday. A couple of days before, there was a lone shoe on the hundred-metre-long Malindi pier, known locally as Buntwani. There was one in the car park of the local mall and even a sandal outside the entrance of the Tourist Market.
In search of an answer, I visited Wikipedia, where I found an article that said, “There are many hypotheses about why footwear is found more than other types of clothing or why footwear is noticed more than other types of clothing.”
The article claimed that some shoe abandonment is intentional, as in the practice of shoe tossing, in which shoes are tied together by their laces and thrown into trees, over power lines or over fences.
In Cape Town, where I lived previously, the act of hanging shoes from power lines was quite a thing. Interpretations varied widely depending on whom I asked, but the practice was generally associated with juvenile pranks.
Of course, there is probably a perfectly logical reason for the increasing number of abandoned shoes I keep seeing, and I would love to hear it.
