My love affair - with jandals

CHRISTINE CORNEGE/Marlborough Express

OBJECT OF DESIRE: Surf lifesaver Fleur Lovejoy in a National Jandal Day promotion.

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We met in the spring of 2002, on the day I lost my job. I was living in London, working just off Oxford St in the city's busy core.

The sweet-faced HR woman took me into a windowless meeting room and told me, in tones that you might use to tell someone their mother had died, that I was being made redundant.

I stumbled back to my desk and told my workmates I was taking the rest of the day off. I wandered through the throngs of people on Oxford St to the tube, and found myself, not long after, on a train rattling through the countryside, up to Oxford herself.

Staring out as the paddocks whizzed past, I made a list of what I could do with the rest of my life. Top of the list was "buy jandals".

The coming of summer in Britain is a natural wonder. Just as daffodils burst from the soggy, winter-hard ground, so do people bloom from their dark coats and scarfs and gloves into colourful, happy specimens who smile and chat on street corners, who hold their heads up to the sun.

And, suddenly, all manner of summer biz is available in shops, including a million and one pairs of jandals.

My red jandals and I met in a shop on Oxford's high street. I don't know why I liked them particularly, perhaps just because they are red. They have multi-coloured stripes painted on to them, they are frivolous and carefree, and I felt instantly better about the whole "redundant" thing.

I went to a pub by the river and drank a tall glass of Pimm's, my life list on the table in front of me. I crossed off "buy jandals". That just left "get career" and "win Lotto".

Three months later, the jandals and I took a trip. We spent my redundancy money on a campervan and went to France for a few months. I got a job picking grapes at a vineyard in Burgundy, and at the end of each day, my hair, my skin and my jandals were sticky with squished grapes and sweat. It wasn't a glamorous job, and the pay was basic, but the food at lunch was always amazing.

Each day I kicked my jandals off under the ancient trestle tables we sat at, and tucked into a five- course meal, and glass after glass of wine. The other vendangeurs taught me the words for condiments, cutlery, anything they could see and name.

They used their schoolboy English on me to talk about rugby. I loved the afternoons, still a little sleepy from the big lunch, when the vineyard seemed to be golden. I'd look up from my row and see vines and the village at the foot of the hill. I felt the crunchy grass tickle the tops of my feet.

When was it that I realised my jandals were an essential part of my summer, of my wardrobe, of my identity? It was one humid night, so hot it felt like someone had left a heater on for 100 years in a locked room, as I slipped on my red jandals to go out for dinner.

I was in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where wearing closed-in shoes is tantamount to setting your feet on fire. By then, the red jandals were three years old, and the painted stripes had worn away under my toes, heels and balls of my feet.

The foam under the big toes was getting a bit thin. I thought they would never handle Phnom Penh's gritty streets. But they prevailed.

To me, jandals are freedom. They let you be cool and have your skin open to nature and yet they still protect you from the dangers of prickles, stones and bee stings.

There are no socks to put on, no buckles to do up, no laces, not even Velcro. You simply slide your foot in, and if your jandals fit like mine do, your feet are instantly uber-comfortable, ready to go. When I was pregnant two summers ago with my son, my jandals were the only solace for my poor, sausage-shaped feet.

When my son's first teeth came, it was my jandals that he put in his mouth for relief. I love the neat clip-click they make when you walk in them; it's the sound of trips to the dairy for an iceblock, or crashing through long grass to get to the swimming hole.

It's the feeling of hot dashboards and the stickiness of sunblock. It's a wet towel drying on the bonnet.

The jandals and I are still together. Seven years - way longer than any romantic relationship I've had. We've had adventures. We've been places.

I think, when they're finally ready to be retired, I'll put them in a frame on my wall, a souvenir of everywhere I've been, every place we've walked together.

Today, the jandals and I live a more down-beat life.

They sit at the back door, waiting for me to water the garden.

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