When I die I hope I'm not wearing new shoes

I bought some new shoes last weekend.  Don't ask me why but I always like to get them worn in as soon as possible.  This is because I suffer from an irrational fear of dying without having got value for money out of a recent purchase.  If there's an official name for this phobia I don't know what it is.

I feel pretty much like this about everything I buy.  I don't imagine it would be my most pressing concern if I got hit by a bus, that I hadn't used my shoes much, but somehow I feel it matters.

The cousin of this feeling is the pride I feel in throwing things away that are completely worn out.  Last year I threw away one pair of cycling shorts and two pairs of cycling trousers and all three pair had completely worn through on the arse.  In fact, I had continued to wear them for a while with holes in the arses, but Ruth eventually told me I shouldn't go out like that anymore in case I got arrested.

I felt really good about having worn something all the way from brand new to completely destroyed and in general I really enjoy owning things that I use, and I don't like owning things I don't.

I like having pots and pans and plates and cups that are used over and over again, but I really don't like having that pair of trousers that I bought to work in a call centre but which I'm now too fat for, and I don't know why I'm keeping them because I doubt I'll ever be a 32 waist again, but I can't seem to give up hope.

Anyway, I wore the new shoes every day last week, and although they still look new, I know that if I get wiped out later this weekend, I'll at least have got a few pence worth of wear out of them, so my dying-without-having-worn-my-shoes-in phobia is affecting me less as the week goes on.

I'm also feeling a lot better now about my Green Eggs and Ham cycling jersey.  The first few times I wore it, it was buried under layers and layers of overcoats and woolly jumpers because of the terrible weather, so no-one had ever actually seen it, but the last few weeks I've actually used it as a top layer a few times, and so now the £45 price tag is weighing a lot less heavily on me.  By the way, the shoes only cost £30.

I wonder if this fear of dying without having worn stuff in will get worse as I get older.  I wonder if there's an age beyond which the buying of new things will be completely impossible, an age when even the purchasing of green bananas and tinned food with a good date on it will induce mild panic?

I guess there's only one way to find out.  I'm coming after you Future, and I've got my new shoes on!

The first time I met a Geordie I was kicking a hedgehog against his house

I live up north now, and over the years I've met lots of Geordies.  Some of them are quite nice.

The first time I met a Geordie though, it didn't go too well.  I was living in Leeds at the time, in a terraced house, and being keen on football, as I was, I used to like nothing better than to kick a football against a wall.  I could go on for hours.

If I didn't have a football, a tennis ball or anything else vaguely football shaped would do.  Now I didn't have a dog at the time, so I don't know why I ended up with it, but one day I had managed to acquire a squeaky dog toy in the shape of a hedgehog.  This acted in many ways very similar to a ball except with it being shaped like a hedgehog it didn't always roll very well.

One day I was kicking said hedgehog against the side of the end terraced house in our street, and this ferocious old bloke with a Geordie accent came out of his house, and told me to stop kicking that bloody ball against my house, I'm trying to watch TV.

It's not a ball, it's a hedgehog, I said.  I always like to get the facts straight, even when I'm being bollocked.

This only seemed to anger him further, and he came out with a string of expletives in Geordie, the gist of which seemed to be not to give him any more cheek or he'd be shoving the bloody hedgehog up my arse.

I sort of steered clear of him after that.

I've met loads of Geordies since and a lot of them are quite nice.

I expect he might have been too, if it hadn't been for the repeated 'bang, squeak, bang, squeak' against his house.  Ah well, never mind.