The boat at night

As a Sea Scout I used to sleep in a small sailing boat, watching the endless night skies with their countless stars, sitting in the middle of the water with just the sound of water lapping against the wale to keep me company. It’s cold, wet, away from everything familiar, and the best feeling in the universe.

I would like to report a more dignified route back to that boat than the one I actually took, which ran through a pair of loafers.

For a year or two I had worn almost nothing but Allbirds. Then, in April, the Guardian reported that the company was leaving shoes behind to buy graphics processors, under the new name NewBird AI, and that its shares had gone up more than 500 per cent on the news. Whatever that was going to do for the shareholders, it left me thinking I would need a new favourite sooner or later. Loafers seemed worth a look. They felt fancy to me, with a bit of an Ivy, confused-professor aura, and my experience of them was limited, so at the time I was careful to call the whole thing “a flirtation, not a decision yet.”

Welted leather shoes were a country I had barely visited, and I was reading the brochures, which got funnier the longer I read them. Shops call the Paraboot Thiers light, casual, easy, everyday. That’s true enough inside that country, where a few hundred grams counts as a philosophical difference and the shoe you’re comparing it with is a Chambord. Beside the knitted trainers I wore every day, a Thiers is huge. I read one described as “a substantial shoe that happens to open at the top.” Buddy, they all open at the top. That’s where our legs attach to our feet.

Not long into the flirtation I pulled on a black Paraboot Reims and got the feeling of a puzzle piece clicking into place. I instantly fell in love: so much shoe, such attitude, such character and soul. They satisfied the dream I’d had of a loafer. Iffy loafers, honestly, but also stompers that don’t get scared by wilder surroundings, that would eat up gravel and grass and still be beautiful menswear while doing it. For due diligence I tried an Astorflex loafer too, and it was a comfy fit, but there was no click and the register was wrong: too rock and roll, smoking rollups and throwing back a beer, a V8 and a diner. Hamburgers. Not what I am.

That’s a lot to hang on a loafer, and having said it I seemed to owe an account of what I was instead. The first answer that came was geography. I’ve wandered through deserts in Nevada and New Mexico, I’ve waded through rivers in Austria, I’ve walked through so much mud in the Netherlands, and I look at beautiful countryside roads in the UK with longing. All of that is true, and the Reims suit the man it describes, but the thing I was trying to name was older than any of those places, and when I kept pulling, the thread ended in the boat.

I grew up in and around Rotterdam, a Boy Scout from the age of eight and then a Sea Scout, until I was sixteen. That meant camping in woods, flashlights between dark trees hunting for clues with a compass and a map, sailing over calm rivers and wild large lakes, building watchtowers out of nothing but wooden trunks and rope, building rafts with not much more, learning to tie knots, use rope, trim sails, and then the boat and the stars. You and nature, and you able to be an actor in its context, to work with it, to be part of it. It’s deep in my soul.

It also turns out to be where I learned to get dressed. Scouting is where I first wore what are essentially chinos, with button-up shirts and solid shoes and a neck scarf that went on for presenting and came off for hard work. All of it was hardy cloth that could take the week without anyone worrying about rips and tears. Just you and getting things done. I’ve never sailed upwind, trimming sails and calling instructions to the other scouts about theirs, while worrying that a thin suit fabric would tear and be ruined by the water. I’ve never slept in a tent in the woods thinking my dress overcoat was too cold and too precious. Nobody has to put sentences like those into words, but I seem to have been getting dressed by them ever since.

None of this is the fantasy of the hardy country boy, and it isn’t the military either, though scout training runs through both of them. To my senses it’s a hardy, true, honest experience of the world, and what I expect to be able to do in what I wear.

Once I had seen that, I kept finding it. The oxford button-downs I live in now fit the pattern: I spent six years in the United States and I like the academic in them, but they also feel like the scouting blouse. Stronger. Practical. The field jackets and Games blazers in my wardrobe are elegant in their own ways, but with a foot in another life. All of it predates the lived experiences I usually reach for, and it explains me better than Ivy on its own ever would.

Those were my formative years, eight to sixteen. I actually had a few tears going through all of this.

I know how this looks. A formative insight arriving in the middle of a shoe purchase is exactly the kind of story you would invent to justify the nicer pair, particularly when the nicer pair comes with an Alpine origin, French specificity, a following of a few select people and the promise of ten or fifteen years of wear. But I had brushed against the connection before, had felt something scouting-shaped in the shirts I kept choosing, and had let it pass. All the shoes did was pull the thread.

A few hours later I was still turning it over, and I landed on something from Carl Jung that I’ve always found profound, which I’m paraphrasing because I remember the intent rather than the wording: those who remain unconscious of their unconscious will forever be ruled by it, and call it fate. Fate is a large word to spend on footwear, but I had been choosing shirts for years with plenty of vocabulary and not much idea who was doing the choosing. I came out of it feeling a little more complete and a little more grounded. An investigated mind is a more enriched place to exist in.

The investigated foot, it emerged a few weeks later, was an 8.5. I learned this embarrassingly late: a full size smaller than the trainers I’d been buying for a decade or two, and smaller too than the Paraboots already in the flat, which were 9s. In the Drake’s shop, buying desert boots, the man serving me had asked if they fit ok, and I’d said yes, because that’s what you say, and because I had no idea what ok was supposed to feel like. Nobody teaches you this.

So the Reims were rebought in the right size, and the Michael, which had joined them by then, got a foam insole with a proper heel cup, the heel cup turning out to be such a big factor. The Michael has a Tyrolean outline and a thick sole, and Paraboot’s own history lists it, from 1945, among the lighter models the company made for architects, surveyors and veterinarians. Light again. They’re very grandpa coded. They’re also ugly. I sort of like that about them; it’s opinionated, and if you know you know. I caught myself writing: “God, I love how they look. I’d frigging live in them if I could. If people think Chris, they’d see me in those shoes.”

I took them for test walks around the flat, whose floor is perfectly even and therefore proves nothing, and then out onto the pavements of Elephant & Castle for the real exam, where there isn’t a flat stretch anywhere and every walk is a balancing act. Two weeks in, a fifteen-minute walk was still waking up small muscles I don’t usually use. I had no idea that’s what I signed up for. At least they looked nice.

What survived the flirtation is three pairs by the door: Reims in café, Reims in noir, and a Michael Cerf in marron, deer leather, quiet but confident. It took a pair of loafers to get me back to that boat, and I’ll take it. I hope the Reims remind me of it every time I put them on.

Chris Chabot, June 2026