Terry Prone: Please don’t expose your toes. Ever. And don’t even mention the other thing

Whether you fancy flip-flops or are tempted to cause sandal, just don't. And if you do that other thing, please stop it at once.

One small mercy came with last month being the wettest Irish July ever — it cut down on the sandal-wearing. Yet many persist in shamelessly parading feet that should be kept away from our eyes. Stock Picture: iStock

This column, today, is going to be disgusting. Fair warning to those of delicate sensibilities. It’s going to be physically disgusting, dealing with the two worst sections of the human body, starting down south with the feet.

Summer is bare feet season. Half the people who normally hide their feet in trainers go to Decathlon and buy sandals for themselves. The other half go with flip-flops.

The RTÉ controversy alerted us to a contradiction in terms: The luxury flip-flop. But for the majority they’re cheap as chips and rightly so.

Under the heading of “small mercies” is the fact that last month being the wettest Irish July ever did cut down a little on sandal-wearing, wellies being more practically applicable. 

But the thing is that sandals are like long socks for school kids in the olden times: Once a particular date is reached, sandal-wearers wear the bloody things for a solid awful month or six weeks, regardless of the effect on others. 

During that period, they shamelessly parade what should be encased in socks, tights, proper lace-up shoes or — even better — tights and dress shoes with high heels.

Older men are mocked for wearing socks with sandals but at least they spare the rest of us from the full nakedness of their pedal digits. Sock picture

The benefit to humanity of shoes with four-inch heels is that nothing so effectively distracts from the natural shape of the human foot. That shape is acceptable in babies. Indeed, it’s tolerable up to the age of about seven. After that, concealment should be legally demanded.

People have no idea how nauseating their own bare feet are. Older men are mocked for wearing socks with their sandals but at least they spare the rest of us from the full nakedness of their pedal digits. 

Big toe. Big no

Of which by far the worst are the big toes. The big toes are the giveaways to the whole character of the naked foot. The worst are the ones that tilt drunkenly over towards the rest, with a bulge below the toe itself. 

This is what is known as a bunion, and we’re sorry for the sufferer’s trouble, we really are, but bunions are the only excuse for Crocs, those brightly-coloured plastic clogs that, like the cockroach, are hated by all but impossible to kill off. 

Crocs conceal the shape of the foot so nobody has to know about your big toe leaning drunkenly left or right.

Not that bunions are the only foot problem from which unfortunates suffer. 

Stop. Hammer time

Take the hammer toe. If you have hammer toes, it’s like each toe has two speed bumps on its way to the toenail. It is possible to surgically weaken the tendon that scrunches up these toes so that they relax and lie properly, but nobody tells you this is possible.

Mostly, when you get sore spots, blisters, and eventual corns on hammer toes, foot specialists take the easy option and claim it was caused by wearing shoes with high heels, which in fact have nothing to do with it. 

The difficulty untreated hammer toes create is that, when their owner puts them in sandals, the lesions show, unless the owner of the lesions conceals them beneath tiny circular Dr Scholl’s corn plasters. Which is worse.

A corn-plastered foot is one of the ugliest things known to humanity. 

My boy lollipop

But a naked foot doesn’t have to be damaged in order to be appalling. I once knew a man whose big toes were like lollipops. They were roundy, fat, and self-satisfied at the nail end, but surprisingly narrow just below. The nails of the big toes were disproportionately small and the toes swelled up around them as if they were going to burst. 

Every summer, I gazed into this man’s eyes with such concentration, he undoubtedly believed I found him much more interesting than he actually was.

This was the unintended consequence of avoiding looking at his nearly-naked lollipop feet.

Synge street

Before my brief, unimpressive theatrical career petered to a halt, I used to pray I would never be cast in any of JM Synge’s works, wherein the characters are all barefoot — meaning that actors might start the night with reasonably clean feet but end up manky from stage dirt. 

Disgusting. But lower on the literary disgustingness scale than Joyce. 

A single word from Ulysses, frequently quoted by her father, put Terry Prone off ever even trying to read James Joyce's acclaimed novel. File picture: Hulton Archive/Getty

Never mind the forthrightness of Molly Bloom. One line from Ulysses, lovingly, frequently, and repellently quoted by my father, put me off ever even trying to have a go at that book. The line referred to “the snotgreen sea” and still gives me the heebie jeebies. As does that s-word in any context.

Here's that other thing...

Which brings us to the other disgusting part of the human body — nasal contents — and the reason we taint this bank holiday Monday by giving them/it some reluctant consideration.

It’s not bad enough that research has bored something of a hole in the reputation of masks as a way to prevent covid. They’re not quite the heroes we thought they were. Some of us, who looked down on non-mask wearers as endangering us, now feel like eejits.

What’s worse, though, is the research that has recently found that nose-picking people are more likely to get covid than the rest of us. The awful thing is that this research was conducted among healthcare workers, who we expect to have high standards and so eschew revolting habits such as nosepicking.

Sadly, no.

The retrospective study showed that nearly 85% of the healthcare workers surveyed reported picking their noses. Not all of them did it all the time, but frequency doesn’t seem to have influenced what proportion of them got the coronavirus.

Roughly 17% of self-confessed nose-pickers contracted it, compared with about 6% of those who said they didn’t engage in such reprehensible actions. (Scientific validation of the relative claims does not seem to have been part of the research, for inescapably obvious reasons.)

Jonne J Sikkens, a clinical epidemiologist at Amsterdam University Medical Centers, who led the study, said it was “quite funny” to investigate the topic, which says something about this guy’s sense of humour. 

The upshot of our clinical epidemiologist's research is simple: Don't stick your fingers up your nose. Stock picture: iStock 

The emerging theory is that inserting a digit in your nose after touching a contaminated surface is a remarkably effective way to insert the virus inside you.

But hold, I hear you cry, aren’t our noses supposed to be equipped with the most marvellous assortment of defences against invasion? Don’t mucous membranes line our nasal cavities, offering effective protection at the point of entry so the immune system can kill them off before they start to replicate?

True. But, experts say, nose picking damages this frontline protection and lets the enemy pass. The bad stuff that has been trapped gets actively pushed into the bloodstream, Of course, wearing a mask prevents nose-picking, and may be part of a wider virtuous patten including regular handwashing. So we don’t know if it was that pattern, rather than the simple avoidance of nose-picking, that prevented covid spread among respondents.

The very thought of it, though.