What: Dune Olsen pumps
When: Friday, May 7th, 2010
Where: Bowling with friends
With: Ancient jeans (Dorothy Perkins), tank (Topshop); blazer (New Look)

Bowling. If there’s a more difficult activity to dress for, well, I don’t know what it is. And I don’t think I want to know. Let’s face it: bowling shoes are ugly. Nothing looks good with them. Nothing. Certainly nothing I own, anyway, because it was only as I opened my wardrobe last night to get ready to go bowling with my friends that I suddenly remembered that I only own skinny jeans. No boot cuts. No wide-legs. Just skinnies. (Actually, I do have some trousers with wider legs, plus a single pair of straight-leg jeans, but they’re all cut to wear with heels, and look even stranger rolled up than the skinnies do.) And skinny jeans + huge white flat lace-ups does not a good look make. Mind you, I’d say that NOTHING makes for a good look when combined with bright white, lace-up flats, so I was forced to just suck it up, roll up the legs of my jeans and accept that I was going to look like I’d gotten dressed in the dark for a couple of hours.

To make up for this humiliation, I wore the most impractical shoes I own to the bowling alley:

This actually turned out to be a more sensible idea than you might think in terms of working these shoes into the Shoe Challenge, because I only had to walk into the bowling alley, back out, and then from the car to our friends’ front door and back. And trust me, that’s about as much walking as you’d want to do in these, because they have a 4.5″ heel and NO PLATFORM, so they completely change your centre of balance, and even I need to do a couple of practice laps of the house before heading out in them. As a comparison, when I was deciding what to wear, I put on these and walked around in them for a while, then changed into the River Island peep toes from last week. The RI shoes have exactly the same height of heel, but because they also have a half-inch platform, after these babies they felt as comfortable as a pair of flats, and I’m not joking.

(I put the Dune shoes back on, though, in honour of the Shoe Challenge. I wear the impractical shoes so you don’t have to, readers! You’re welcome!)

Once at the bowling alley, though:

Don’t lie, you want these shoes.

You can’t have them, though, because… these are MY OWN BOWLING SHOES.

Yes, I am THAT MUCH of a shoe addict that I own bowling shoes. Or OK, not quite: what actually happened was that a few years back, Shoeperman decided he wanted to go bowling all the time. And I whined so much about having to wear nasty shoes that hundreds of other people had had their sweaty feet in (yes, I know they sanitise them, but it still feels icky to me) that when my parents were in the States that year and saw some bowling shoes on sale, they bought them for me. It’s actually a pretty good way to freak out the people you go bowling with, because when you pull out your own shoes, they immediately assume you’re some kind of professional bowler, rather than just being a professional shoe-collector, which is what I am.

Of course, “professional bowler” could not be further from the truth for me:

I’m “Amz”. I didn’t do so good.

I actually recovered enough to come third in this game, but in the next game I was… last. Ah, well.

I was rewarded for my efforts, though:

Notice how we got another, smaller pizza “just in case”?

Oh, and by the end of the evening, I was even able to run (well, trot) to the car in my stilettos. Practice makes perfect, people. Just not when it comes to bowling.