A pair of hot pink cowboy boots with black detailing and snakeskin toes are the objects that have defined my week.
I picked up these cowboy boots three years ago in a charity shop before they were ‘cool’. I wore them once to school, decided they were a bit too much for me, and deposited them at the back of my cupboard. Then I started at Oxford and quickly realised that I was incapable of wearing heels without them either falling off or me falling over. I had to think of some alternative formal shoes, and so out came the pink cowboy boots. Luckily, they went quite well with my all-black wardrobe and so a beautiful friendship was formed.
They came with me to every formal, every function, everywhere I had to dress up for. Their crowning moment was a 2am trip back from a black tie bop at The Isis Farmhouse. My charity shop find (not to mention my feet) survived the hour-long, 2.5-mile trek back to college in February. Safe to say, my pink cowboy boots were proving to be trusty sidekicks.
‘Were’, here, is the operative word.
Their decline began this term. My friend managed to squeeze me onto his table for the Oxford Caledonian Society (CalSoc) ball this term, with the caveat that I actually learnt the dances. This seemed straightforward enough. In reality, my fear of cycling along the main road to St Hilda’s in the dark meant that I made it to a grand total of two practices. To complicate things further, the dances are also done in pairs, but my friends were too good to stoop down to my amateur level. Turning up alone was daunting, so not turning up at all seemed like the best alternative. The day before the ball dawned and I had still not done my duty to earn my seat at the table. I turned to trusty YouTube and started to pray.
Choosing an outfit seemed relatively simple compared to my dance dilemma. Not wanting to ruin my new ball gown, I landed on a five-euro floral number found in a vintage store in Athens. Incidentally, it exactly matched my hot pink cowboy boots. Not learning the dances may have been the start of my downfall, but this decision proved the making of my deathbed.
I may have the persona of an extrovert, but deep down, I am a naturally shy person. I am also a procrastinator who hates turning up unprepared. This proved to be a wonderful combination of attributes. Arriving at pres in my pink cowboy boots, I believed myself fully unequipped to take on CalSoc. My one hour of YouTube revision before had (obviously) done nothing to help. I landed on a last-ditch solution: I opened my bottle of wine and proceeded to drink half of it before anyone else had even turned up.
Tipsy at 7 pm, I was faced with my first of many fears: filling up my dance card. Do they ask me? Do I ask them? All I knew was that I needed to get as many names down as possible. There’s a lot of pressure in this. I felt that I didn’t have much to offer: I wasn’t single and I didn’t know the dances, which in my mind equalled a pretty unalluring partner. Now a bottle of wine in, I managed to (somehow) coerce enough guys into dancing with me that my card was mostly full. It was officially CalSoc time.
What do you do when you turn up to a hall full of people that you kind-of know, but not well enough for more than a polite ‘hello’? A room full of acquaintances, friends-of-friends, and some people you’d have rather not seen again. Well, you do what I did. Which was find the free alcohol. And drink it. The conversation was jolty, but I was very successfully drowning my looming fear of the fast-approaching first dance with glass after glass of champagne. “Very drunk, very stressed” were the exact words I texted my boyfriend around about this time.
I may have been drunk, but I needn’t have been stressed. The first dance was great fun, and so was the second. I realised that they were quite repetitive, and so after a while you just picked it up. My worries now felt foolish – I had made a big deal about nothing at all.
However, having got used to holding a drink in my hand, I subconsciously kept one there. The nervousness hadn’t quite gone away yet; any awkward pauses were filled with a sip of wine. Spinning around a room while drunk obviously doesn’t sound very sensible. I ended up on the floor at one point, dropped by a guy who later defended his actions by saying that I shouldn’t have been that drunk. This may have been a fair assessment, but who was he to judge?
Having overcome my fear of dancing, a new problem was fast approaching: “My feet hurt, like a lot” (another drunk text).
My trusty sidekicks, my friends through thick and thin, my Isis Farmhouse-trekking hot pink cowboy boots, were killing me. By the halfway point of the night, I could barely walk. My feet were so numb that I couldn’t even feel the floor when I took my boots off. Walking without them was by now just as painful as walking with them. Increasingly weary and increasingly in pain, I decided to up the alcohol yet again in the hope that it had medicinal qualities.
The dances weren’t fun anymore. I suffered with every step. I can safely say I was experiencing one of the top five most agonising moments of my life. You may think I’m overreacting, but walk a mile in my shoes, and then you can talk. I debated sticking it out or dipping early and going home. I debated whether it was better to stay and watch the clock, or leave and risk missing out.
In the end, I apologised to my remaining dance partners and limped out to a taxi. Cinderella left the ball, holding her hot pink slippers, without her prince, and without having really achieved anything. Yes, I had gotten over my fear of not knowing the dances, but my memory of their enjoyment was clouded by the pain that my pink cowboy boots had inflicted upon me. Taking them off, I realised that my feet were bruised so badly that they had turned blue. They remained in that state for a week.
Hungover, battered and bruised, I was unable to even look at my pink cowboy boots without remembering that absolute car crash of a night. I tried to focus on the positives. I had had fun. In between the drinks and the loneliness and the pain, there had been instances of pure elation. But had they been enough?
It is interesting in life how one decision can make all the difference, one small thing can turn something sour. I kept wondering how different it would have been if I had gone with trainers, rather than my pink cowboy boots. Would I have made it through all the dances, would I have made it to the afters, would I have needed alcohol as a crutch?
There is, however, no point in pondering over the ‘what ifs’. What’s done is done. I won’t let my memories be overshadowed by one bad thing (especially when that one bad thing is pretty and pink). I had an eventful night. I can say I’ve been there, I’ve done it. And next time I’ll wear trainers.