The story of a pair of boots

 I have just received these beauties back from the repairers up in Preston and have therefore completed my triumvirate of plus forty-something methods of transport. My car is a 1983 Citroen 2CV and my bicycle is a 1982 (I think) Claud Butler Sierra 10-speed. But the boots, with their brand-new Vibram soles, are a pair of Scarpa Dom leather climbing boots, from Italy, which I bought from my mate Tom, who was working in the Scout Shop on the Headrow in Leeds back in 1982. They have been loyal but were in desperate need of fettling and have now been fettled.

After I left university in the summer of 1980, I knew that I couldn't go straight into a normal job or I would go mad with cabin fever. So I spent the next three years working in the winters back in my hometown of Pudsey, West Yorkshire, and then going off travelling in the summers. Usually I went off busking around Europe for the whole summer and I got to see lots of countries in that time. But in the winter of 1981/2 I had worked the whole winter in a large bakery, working 60 hours a week over five 12-hour days, rotating each week between day shift and night shift. It was a bit gruelling, and I ended up with some distinctive scars on my left inner arm, which you always got if you let the steel sheets, containing maybe 12 loaves, tip onto your arm as you unloaded them from the oven end with insulated gloves. 

But I had saved up enough money to go further afield than Europe, and had decided to go to North America and visit all my relatives on the US East Coast and the Canadian West Coast. So I needed solid boots for the three months I would be over there, and I had enough saved up to shell out the hefty £40 which they cost (nearly £200 in today's money)

But I should also mention in passing that the summer of 1982 offered me another option which Cro was always anachronistically annoyed with me for turning down. Since the 1940s Bradford has always had a large population of residents who came here from Pakistan to work in the labour-intensive spinning and weaving industry. About a quarter of the population today has roots in Pakistan, even though they can easily be great-grandchildren of people who were themselves born in Bradford. So when I worked in the bakery (which was more like a bread factory, as about 300 people worked there) a lot of my colleagues were from Pakistan or Pakistani family. As we worked on the production line, conversation was one of the few reliefs from boredom, and two or three of the crew on my line told me that each year, when the Eid festival was coming up, it was normal for groups of guys from Bradford to buy a Ford Transit minibus here and then drive it overland to Pakistan, to leave it with a family member who would start up a business with it. Then after celebrating the festival in Pakistan, the Bradford group would fly back to the UK. And they asked if I fancied joining in to help with the drive. 

If you know the geography of the region you will see that it is quite a challenge. It is about 5500 miles, and after passing through the length of Europe down to Istanbul, you drive all the way through Turkey, then Iran, then Afghanistan, then Pakistan. In the 1980s this was apparently still possible, though I can see problems with it today. I sort-of regret not taking them up on the offer, but when I took my boots the other way across the Atlantic I did have a great time. 

The highlight of it was that I hitched all the way from Philadelphia on the US East Coast to Prince Rupert on the Canadian West Coast, where I caught the ferry out to the islands where my relatives lived. So all in all I hitched about 3300 miles, at just about the end of the time when people were still safely hitching in the US. I think you can still hitch and car share when you get to the remoter parts of Canada, because there is not much other choice sometimes. 

But now, the boots are back, and I am pretty healthy, so I have to find which direction these boots are made to walk (cue Nancy Sinatra...)

And here are the other two parts of my ancient triumvirate: