My cat shoes are possibly the best material purchase I’ve ever made.

Not only am I now the coolest person I know, I also have a flawless excuse for keeping my head down – to look at my shoes of course.

I can’t tell you if these are men’s shoes or women’s shoes or unisex or what, because to be honest when I saw them on the shelf in the store my brain had only one function – to send a message to my hand and tell it to pick these babies up as fast as possible and never let them go. Ever.

Turns out I had to let them go three seconds later. They didn’t fit me.

But somehow the shop assistant managed to understand my incoherent babble: “CATS. FEET. ME”, and seeing the urgency in my eyes he promptly produced more of these magnificent canvas and rubber anomalies.

He must have brought out about four different pairs, having understood early on that I was incapable of telling him my size. I barely knew my own name at this point. Remembering my shoe size was out of the question.

Let me be clear: I was not inebriated. This is the effect that the combination of cats and shoes evidently has on me.

It wasn’t until I was a safe distance from the shop that I flung off my trusty Havaianas with an overenthusiastic ankle flip so forceful that it turned the right one into what can only be described as a rogue propeller blade. Wobbling gracefully through the air, my deceptively aerodynamic flip flop careened dangerously close to a small passing woman. And a few school children. And an escalator.

But there was no time to worry about that, for there were cats afoot.

….Nice.

I had no idea until I reluctantly took them off 12 hours later (apparently my husband has a problem with people who wear shoes to bed. What??) that they were in fact Vans. Nor did I realise they were commissioned by the ASPCA. I was pretty pleased to discover the latter, and suitably indifferent to the former. I’ve never owned a pair of Vans, and I recall once wondering for about 0.02 seconds what the fuss was all about. I’m not concerned with brands, I don’t care for status symbols. But I sure as hell would walk over my own grandmother for the opportunity to have cats adorning my feet.

I’ve added some extra style to the insides with some pretty fierce arch support insoles.
And you best believe I’ve been rocking them ever since, getting nods of approval from every cat I pass on the street.