Disturbing news from the Japanese Grand Prix: “[Mark] Webber was suffering from food poisoning and vomited in his helmet during the first safety-car period.” Er, yuck?

<seamless segue> I have not been vomiting, but I have been shopping! The bonus of being a coward* is that you get entire Saturdays free to, like, buy stuff. Yesterday I had the mission of acquiring [edit: shopping list removed. Sorry, nearly forgot that blogs are not supposed to be boring].

My task was complicated by the fact that there was a festival in the town centre, which simultaneously increased the density of people and decreased the average perambulatory speed (known to scientists as the Spanish Language Student Phenomenon). This was no surprise, as Bonn is ALWAYS having festivals in the town centre. This one seemed to be a celebration of nothing more than the fact that all the shops will be open on a Sunday for once. Woo hoo! Still, the people of Bonn need no more excuse than that to have a good time. Here, body parts of children sausages are being grilled on some medieval rack:

Anyway, I was partly shopping for some new boots. Sigh. I would like to briefly comment on the relentless rubbishness of shoes. To wit: ALL the women’s shoes seemed to have been cobbled by the Brothers Grim. Example:

Minging.

Also minging. (There is a pattern here.)

Admittedly, I like wearing the kind of men’s shoes that might have been worn by a Victorian chimney sweep, so my tastes are not mainstream. But even a man who dresses up as a centaur every day of the week and wears slip-on cloven hooves would tell you that these are ugly items. Why do people buy them? Why do people DESIGN them? Thanks to these perpetuators of ugliness, finding some non-minging footwear is like finding a piece of meat in a bowl of workhouse gruel. I did find some perfect boots in the goth shop…

… but they were perfect in the sense that they had steel toe caps and didn’t fit, so I had to spend a couple more hours skulking in the men’s department like some reverse transvestite until I found some super cool shoes (Clarks and Josef Seibel (“Where fashion meets comfort”), since you ask).

I don’t want to get all feminist, but it is very striking that men’s shoes seem to have been designed to allow men to walk and run and stuff, while a lot of women’s shoes seem to have been designed to allow women to get pinched toes and hide in a cupboard through shame over the fact that they are wearing such momentously nasty footwear. I don’t know how women can feel safe in shoes they can’t run in. What if Godzilla comes? This is why ballet slippers and other flat shoes are A GOOD THING. Unless, of course, they are faux leopardskin ballet slippers, which I also saw yesterday but was too traumatised to photograph…

* I have not been back to the stables since my freak-out. I told my flatmate that I need Robert ‘Horse Whisperer’ Redford. He was confused, because he thought a horse whisperer helped the horse, not the rider. I reminded him that in the film, RR did sort out some horse but he also helped Scarlett Johansson overcome her fear of riding after having part of her leg amputated. He also slept with Scarlett’s mother, but I don’t think that is generally part of the horse whispering service.