The Hindu : The barefoot campaigner

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Mar 26, 2004

International

International

The barefoot campaigner

EDINBURGH, MARCH 25. For a pair of high-mileage feet, Alan Crowe's seem in extremely good trim. Close scrutiny on the couch of his Edinburgh home reveals no infection, discolouration or blistery stigmata. The dimple-chinned 43-year-old kneads a plump sole gently. "The skin is 5 mm thicker than average. I've plucked out glass splinters 2.5mm long."

Mr. Crowe formally jettisoned shoe-leather in February 2000. It was a kind of ped-epiphany. "Like taking ear-muffs off,'' he explains, talking up the pleasure of warm spring puddles. But this is a lonely paradise. Despite some distinguished practitioners down the years — King David, St. Francis, Tolstoy — the fad has never really caught on. It took until 1994 for the Society for Barefoot Living to be set up, and it only has 971 subscribers worldwide, two-thirds of them American, 68 British. Gangs of heavy-booted youths tend to jeer when they see Mr. Crowe padding by.

He feels this is all an error on an evolutionary scale: "Shoes should have gone the way of tank tops and flares," he groans. The sequence of events, as he sees it, goes something like this: early man, in a moment of fashion weakness, is persuaded to pull on a decorated toe jerkin; the encased limb loses its natural flexibility and gradually the first point of contact with the ground become the stolid heel, rather than the subtler ball of the foot; "shoddies," as Mr. Crowe terms shoe-wearers, are condemned forever to a clumsy means of locomotion that strains the knee joints, shuts off a source of sensory delight, and consumes eight unnecessary joules of energy for every brisk step taken.

Mr. Crowe's evidence is based on a close study of the principles of mechanical engineering. To most people the foot is a useful dangly thing attached to each leg. To Mr. Crowe it is a whirring world of precision levers, springs and hinges rusting away through neglect. He inspects the underside of his visitor's toes. "They're soft," he cries. "How sad." To propagate his message, Mr. Crowe hands out pamphlets in the street. At home he vigorously manipulates a steel simulacrum of the lower limb to demonstrate the biological folly of heel-creep. But he is not a barefoot obsessive. He slips quietly into toe-jerkins to clean out the garden drain, and to play in his amateur orchestra. And whenever he meets his mother: "She does not like this business at all." —

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