As a Sea Scout I sometimes slept in a small sailing boat on open water. At night I could see more stars than I ever saw from Rotterdam, with the sound of water against the wale and little else. It was cold and wet, and I loved it. I was a Boy Scout from eight, then a Sea Scout, until I was sixteen.
I started thinking about those years again while shopping for loafers this spring. Walking was coming back to me month by month, which made heavier shoes possible. Loafers still felt fancy, with a slightly Ivy and confused-professor air, and I had little experience with them. My notes from April call the search “a flirtation, not a decision yet.”
The reason I started looking was mundane. I had worn Allbirds almost exclusively for a year or two, and in mid-April the Guardian reported that the company planned to leave shoes for AI infrastructure. I thought I would need a new favourite sooner or later. Shoe brochures became funnier the longer I read them. Shops call the Paraboot Thiers light, casual and easy. That is true among welted shoes, where a few hundred grams makes a noticeable difference. Beside the knitted trainers I wore every day, a Thiers is huge.
Two weeks into the search I tried a black Paraboot Reims and wanted it immediately. It was a lot of shoe, with a heavy sole and far more attitude than the loafers I had imagined. It could cross gravel and grass without losing the shape I liked. For due diligence I tried an Astorflex loafer too. It was comfortable, although its rock-and-roll register gave me an unhelpful association with a V8, a diner and hamburgers. I did not want that pair.
I wanted to understand why I liked the Reims so quickly. I could picture wearing them on wet, uneven ground, but that did not explain the immediate attraction. The scouting memory was older than my later travels. From eight to sixteen I camped in woods, hunted for clues between dark trees with a torch, compass and map, sailed on calm rivers and large rough lakes, built watchtowers from trunks and rope, made rafts, tied knots and trimmed sails.
Scouting was also where I first wore what were essentially chinos, button-up shirts and solid shoes. The neck scarf went on when we presented ourselves and came off for hard work. The cloth had to survive rope, water, mud and a week at camp. The oxford button-downs I wear now continue that pattern. I spent six years in the US and like their academic association, and they also remind me of the scouting blouse.
The timing made me suspicious, so I went back through my April notes to look for the practical preference before I started trying on Paraboots. Scouting also overlaps with country clothing and military uniforms, which offered simpler explanations for what I liked. The same practical preference showed up in the shirts I had kept choosing, before the later travel stories I usually tell about myself. I cried a little while going through it.
The shoes still had to work. A second Paraboot had joined the shortlist by then, the Michael, a thick-soled model introduced in 1945. It looks grandfatherly and a little ugly, both of which I like. In the same week in mid-May I finally learned my actual size, embarrassingly late in life. I am an 8.5, a full size smaller than the sneakers I had bought for a decade or two. A fitter had once asked whether a previous pair fit, and I said yes because I had no idea what “ok” was supposed to feel like. Until this fitting, I still did not know.
I rebought the Reims in the right size, added an insole with a proper heel cup to the Michael, walked around the apartment and then tested both on the uneven pavements around Elephant & Castle. After two weeks, a fifteen-minute walk still woke up small muscles I did not normally use. I had not expected the shoes to change the work of walking that much.
I ended up with three pairs by the door: Reims in café and noir, and a Michael Cerf in marron.