Re, Crocs further down the board, Stacia Briggs says.........

Crocs are like Birkenstocks for people with stress incontinence: discuss.

For the uninitiated, Crocs are the kind of footwear you'd expect to see a Play Person or Lego man wearing. Huge slabs of what seems to be garishly-coloured plastic Swiss cheese which have been hewn into shoes as dainty and subtle as a warthog wearing a tutu.

A cross between a clog and a sandal (a clandal? A slog?), Crocs are available in all shades of a technicolour yawn. The rule of thumb is that the more painfully zany the owner, the more painfully wacky the shade of Crocs.

I've even seen one woman wearing two different Croc colours at the same time - can you begin to imagine how tiresome she is to live with? It'd like being sent down for life and then discovering you had to share a cell with Timmy Mallett or Su Pollard. Or both.

I should add that I am discounting children from my bitter vitriol; firstly, very few of them have any sense of style whatsoever, secondly there is a long and proud tradition of children being forced into ugly, cumbersome footwear by their parents and thirdly I don't want to be dealing with any letters that arrive to me written in crayon and tears.

Adults, however, should know better. They look like blinkered racehorses that have stumbled into a pair of huge feed buckets or special needs ballet dancers putting on a performance for the padded cell crowd.

In short, Croc-owners are desperate to show you just how wacky and 'off the wall' they are by rushing out to buy exactly the same pair of rubberised monstrosities that everyone else with a vacuum between the ears is wearing. Personally, I'm struggling to think of the last pair of shoes I bought myself with the following criteria in mind:

1) Could I walk though water/rivers of blood in a slaughterhouse/a trough of manure while wearing these shoes?

2) Can I run them through the dishwasher at the end of the day?

3) Will I be able to vomit on my own feet with impunity?

4) Am I positive that I'll look like a mental patient with a clown complex when I put them on?

5) Are they so robust that they will never fall apart, or indeed biodegrade, and will therefore exist FOREVER?

Granted, these are the criteria which come into play when I'm buying shoes for my children, but when it comes to buying shoes for myself, I'm almost at the stage where I trust myself not to puke down my own legs or put my shoes away neatly in the dishwasher before I go to bed. Almost.

I gave up attempting to signpost my originality and individuality through the medium of my footwear when I bought my last pair of heavily-buckled winklepickers from the goth emporium in St Benedict's Indoor Market (RIP) back in 1986.

Since then, I've trodden a fairly conventional path when it comes to shoes and in particular have embraced a 'no clogs' rule which has done me proud and prevented me from entering the competitive Birkenstock “shoe-offs” with other mothers outside the school gates (“I see your silver Birkenstocks with contrasting gold stitching from a specialist boutique in Brighton and I raise you my limited-edition Cath Kidston-signed, floral print Birkenstocks with 24 carat gold buckle and go-faster stripes which were imported from the moon…” etc).

While I embrace the concept of comfort and practicality over style, I think there should be caveats attached. For example, I have an incredibly comfortable and practical pair of jogging bottoms that I would no more wear in public than I'd wear a hollowed out baby seal as a hat.

Comfortable and practical they may be, but they remain an offence to the eye, albeit less of an offence than Crocs: you're unlikely to bump into an army of middle-class lemmings on Unthank Road wearing identical pairs of Pineapple joggers circa 1990 with an interesting hole on the left buttock, but every third one of them you see will have Crocs on.

Frankly, though, if these idiots will buy Crocs, they'll buy any old crap. In fact, perhaps I should give my boys in the sweatshop a call and get them to knock up a million reproductions of my hideous jogging bottoms, then I can hint that Kate Moss has a pair and wait for the cash to come rolling in.

And what fresh hell is this? Not content with foisting the most repugnant shoes since the ones I was made to wear to school in the early 1980s (no, Mum, I will never forget) on the world, manufacturers have now brought out a range of accessories you can add to your Crocs to make them look even more ridiculous.

By accessories, I'm not talking about adding a nylon leisure shirt, knee socks and a pair of nut-hugger shorts for that 'old man at the beach' look.

I refer instead to Croc “charms”, which you can buy at great expense to stick in your Croc hole - as it were - to personalise your shoes in the same way that absolutely everyone else has. Now that's what I call individuality.

Worst of all has to be when you discover an entire family struck down by Croc plague, proudly clomping down the street like Windy Miller and his apprentices as if it's perfectly normal for people aged between four and 40 to be wearing exactly the same pair of shoes.

It's not normal. Just because you put your child in the same ugly footwear you're wearing doesn't somehow make it right. It just makes it even creepier.

Mark my words, this will be our legacy to future generations: landfill site after landfill site stacked to the brim with discarded Crocs and their accompanying cutesy tat.

When Armageddon comes, it will be only Crocs and cockcroaches that survive. Stick that in your Croc hole and smoke it.

Posted By: BSE Canary, Sep 5, 18:45:58