Animal Tracks Remembered

Does anyone remember “Animal Tracks” shoes? They were made, I think, by TUF, and were all the rage at my school back in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s. 

The premise was that you would leave marks in the mud as you went about your carefree schoolboy business, fooling others into thinking that a stoat or badger had been in the area (in Liverpool? Yeah, right! The local rats would have kicked their sorry heads in!). There was, however, a key design flaw which rendered this already far-fetched ruse way beyond the bounds of credibility. You see, each shoe contained, on the underside, identically-sized foot indentations of a dozen different animal species. The sole put me in mind of another popular novelty item of the time – the Cadbury’s Milk Tray Bar. This featured the contents of a small box of the legendary chocolate collection fused together in bar form, but I digress. Assuming a small boy’s footprints might be approximately two feet behind one another and maybe six inches apart, TUF were asking people to believe that not one, but TWO legions of 12 different one-legged rodents with identical size feet were hopping in Red Arrows-like formation across inner-city wasteland near Bootle Docks. 

You couldn’t make it up!

I'm sorry for having to leave Twitter unannounced, but the alternative - a tweet which would have smacked of "I'm going. Please beg me to stay" - would have been hugely ironic.

The truth is I was finding it difficult to cope with the levels of neediness, sycophancy, dogmatism and self-promotion that had been an increasing feature of my timeline over the past few months. I've had some great times on Twitter, and would like to thank everyone who has followed, encouraged and supported me over the last 19 months, but recently it has felt like more of a burden than an amusing distraction. I won't miss phrases like "Let's make it happen, Twitter!", "If you're not following @Nobrot, you're clearly stupid" and "Here's how to vote for me, but I don't expect many will". It will also be nice to see the word "genius" used in its proper, and more infrequent, context.

Y'see - Twitter and me are not a good fit any more. I've got my imminent 50th birthday to get through, a bit of am-dram round the corner, then hopefully some proper writing. I'll be grand, and I hope you all will be too. I gather there were some nice messages (posted on something called "Twitter"???). Thanks for those and for reading this.

Take care,

AD x