Shopping For Shoes

I find it pretty difficult shopping for trainers. I mean, anything else I can manage fine: I can pick a single day on which to go shopping and come back with numbers of trousers and tops, all of which resemble something wearable. But with trainers, I just become stuck.

I repeatedly set out to trawl though all the shoe and trainer shops of Oxford Street and Covent Garden or Ilford and Lakeside, but nothing they offer ever seems good enough. Sometimes they're the wrong colour or the wrong price but usually they just don't feel right somehow. "Nah, perhaps they'll be something at the next shop", I think. "After all I'm planning on heading there anyway". I don't buy trainers that often so it's not something I can afford to be unsure about.

But I do need new trainers and get them eventually. Most of the time I end up buying a pair when I'm not even looking for them. For example, a pair could catch my eye as I'm out wondering for another purpose, or I see something when I'm with a friend doing their shopping. The same problems as I listed above could be present here too, and in these may even be something I would not have bought on that other day. But for some reason, when in this particular state of mind, I take the risk and buy anyway.

And this risk always appears to pays off. I've never bought a pair of trainers that I've not grown to love and consider my best ever. It may be due to familiarity and the shoes moulding to my feet (ew) or something equally mundane, but the point is that there's no regret there.

And that's the gyp, I guess: that how you approach a decision might affect its outcome. Rationally it shouldn't really happen but it's kinda like a Heisenberg Principle for decision making. In effect, it means you can't directly achieve this thing you want - if I want a pair of trainers I have to stop looking for them. Perhaps the way out is to dress up the process of looking for shoes as something else? Sounds absurd, but that might just work.

On the other hand perhaps it's not that big a deal anyway; I mean, they are only shoes after all.

EDIT: Judging by the repeated offers I've received by friends to accompany me shoe shopping, it seems I may have been a bit too subtle above. Just so you know, it was supposed to be a bit of a metaphor. Tch, nevermind.