I’d have been aged eight or nine when these beauts made their appearance in the mid-Sixties – so young, I hadn’t yet been entrusted with the dizzy responsibilities of Seconder in the Cub Scouts. I was still very impressionable, when I first noticed some of the other boys in the Cub pack proudly sporting them during Inspection.

Actually, the casual observer could have been excused for not noticing any difference between these and the ‘sensible’ school shoes your mother foisted upon you.

You see, the uppers bore no real difference to any other run of the mill shoe.  It was what lay beneath that made these shoes so special.

Yes, the magic all happened below. Out of sight. On, and wait for it, in the sole of the shoe. How cool was that?

Instead of a regular tread / grip each sole bore the moulded shapes of ten animal footprints. Just one of each distinct species, though. Splash through any small puddle, or mud, or walk on some freshly fallen snow, and you’d leave a trail of various tiny animal tracks to confuse any half-witted fox that may come across them.

I mean … really?

Foxes are known for their cunning and intelligence. Could one be stupid enough to actually believe some minutes earlier, along that very same path, passed such a disparate band of one-footed mammals, all hopping through the woods in uniform formation?

(The animal footprints depicted were, I believe: badger; stag; hedgehog; red squirrel; otter; goat; fox; stoat; sheep .. and fox terrier. Fox Terrier?! Methinks someone ran out of inspiration when they discovered the nine animals they’d already covered still left a gap to filled in any show larger than a Size 3.)

Another thing – what’s the point of animal tracks moulded onto the sole of your shoe? Should Bear Grylls, or some other intrepid explorer, come across an unfamiliar track when out in the wilds, I’m reasonably confident in suggesting he’d use a pocket manual or something to help him identify it – not take off his shoe to compare the muddy imprint.

Anyway, the main attraction of these shoes was not so much the animal tracks, but a small compass, secreted in a special compartment of the right foot’s heel. Genius!

Actually, the real genius here was not so much the design or designer, but the dude who by tapping into the sheer gullibility of eight year old lads, successfully marketed these inherently pointless yet novelty shoes to reluctant parents.

Wait, thinking of it, with thirty-two points on a compass, Wayfinders were anything but ‘pointless,’ but you get my drift.

But hold on. Let’s be sensible, here – what use was a compass to an eight year old? Unless your mother had sewn in the DMS (degrees, minutes and seconds) coordinates of your home address into the collar of your jumper, you’d still be stuffed if you became lost.

What could you do? Even had you been awarded the Navigator Activity badge, without your home coordinates, you had only a one in thirty-two chance of stumbling back into your street. And the danger for those who hadn’t paid proper attention during the Pioneering Badge session, was they’d only retain two words: magnetic and north.

I count myself here as one of the stupid ones who would have ended up in Inverness or somewhere cold and bleak that was not really my intention.

Even worse! What self-respecting young lad doesn’t carry a bar-magnet in their pocket? And that’s not a euphemism. You’d end up in Portsmouth, in a very confused state for goodness sake.

Anyway, the concept of individuality was alien to me at such a young age, and like a sheep, I followed the trend. I did actually manage to badger my folks into buying me a pair of these stoaters, even though they were quite dear at the time.

And where did these shoes take me? I’m unsure. I was very young, remember. It was a long, long time ago.

One thing: though I was unsure at that early age just where Life would take me, I would at least know in what direction I was headed.

_____