A short, sharp stab in the sole

Feet are more sensitive than we know. I don’t mean in a teenage kind of way: they’re not all, like, spewing out emoticons and, like, angry with the world because they’ve got exams and nobody, like, understands them. Nor do they faint at the sight of blood, worry about how many friends they’ve got on Facebook or lie on a sofa writing poetry. They do, though, seem to remember stuff. They have a sort of muscle-memory.

Take stepping on something hard or angular, like a stone, piece of gravel or nail, for example. That kind of short, stab in the sole almost invariably makes me think of wolves. That’s not because I’ve trodden on a wolf, of course. I very much doubt I’d still be here if I had. Rather it’s because the momentary sensation in my foot sends a signal up my spinal cord, turns into a mental prod and flashes up a memory of walking across a dry and very stony riverbed on my way back from a meeting in a school where I worked for a while last summer. I should probably have been sensible and worn proper boots, but it was summer and everybody else was in flip-flops, so I slogged across mounds of jutting shale in a pair of old daps. Not unsurprisingly, the entire journey was punctuated with little jabs of pain.

It wasn’t much better when I reached the other side and the track back to the farm where I was staying. This, too, was dotted with sole-destroying lumps of granite and several large puddles, not mention a few clumps of sheep. As I was negotiating these various obstacles, something slunk out of the trees. It was only a few yards away, but in the dusk all I could make out were eyes, paws, fur. I assumed it was a dog so just kept walking. 

Then I remembered that the only dogs in the village were short-haired beagle-esque hunting dogs – not loping alsatian-sized beasts with somewhat raggedy locks – and that they were considered too valuable to be allowed to roam free. I also remembered that our neighbour had told me that he’d found one of his sheep dismembered in a pasture the day before. Given that this was happening in the Albanian Alps and not in cosy old Bristol, the chances were high that I was actually playing chicken with a wolf. I was also standing between it and its supper – the sheep on the track behind me. 

Fortunately, my naive blundering must have looked like fearlessness and, rather than ripping my throat out or even so much as growling, the beast simply slunk back into the trees. The following morning I found a cowpat with a large paw print in it. Our neighbour assured me that this proved that it had definitely been a wolf.

This is only a single example of a foot-triggered memory, of course, but because I nearly always forget there’s a particularly lumpy bit of pavement just up the street from my house, it’s one that tends to crop up fairly often. It also makes me think that maybe some of the other apparently random memories that jostle around in my head when I’m walking anywhere might be triggered by the things and surfaces I’m actually walking on. Did I remember my dad parking his navy blue Vauxhall Viva outside our house because I just stepped on a paving slab as wonky as the one that used to be in our drive and made a distinctive sound every time someone drove over it? Was I momentarily back in 1980s St Andrews on the night I slipped on the ice and broke my elbow because, the other month, there was frost on the pavement in Stackpool Road and my feet occasionally slid where it had been compacted? Is one reason I’ve felt such a sense of being at home in cities like Prague and Sofia because, under foot, there have been cobbles and tiles which remind me – or my feet – of cobbles in King Street, tiles at the top of Howard Road? 

Put this way, it sounds absurd – but we seem happy enough to accept that our other senses can trigger all sorts of unlikely associations. Proust, after all, wrote an entire cycle of novels based on the memories triggered in his protagonist by one bite of a small cake. And if you take that into account, thinking that what someone’s feet encounter while they’re walking might have some bearing on what’s happening in their brain doesn’t seem quite so ridiculous. 

Photo by Shutterstock of the highest peak in the Albanian Alps