For The First Time In Years, My Feet Stopped Aching By Lunchtime.

A note from a reader about the small Devon boutique sandal that ended the dull, all-day ache she had quietly learned to live with.

I am 61 years old, and for the last five years I had quietly stopped going to places I had to stand in.

I do not think I ever said it out loud. You do not announce a thing like that. You simply start finding reasons.

You take the chair at the edge of the room. You offer to mind the bags so the others can browse the shops without you. You say you will wait in the car. You stop walking the long way along the front because by the end of it your feet are throbbing and the dull ache has crept all the way up to your knees. I had told myself, more than once, that this was simply what 61 felt like, and that I had better get used to it.

What I had, really, was sore, tired, aching feet, and a growing dread of any day that would have me on them.

Then, in the space of about a fortnight, that changed. It changed because of a pair of sandals. I know how that sounds. I would have rolled my eyes too. But I want to tell you about them, because if you are a woman my age and your feet have started deciding where you can and cannot go, I think you have been quietly looking for these for a long time.

What they are

They are called the Merella, and they come from a small coastal boutique in Devon called Torquay Boutique that I had never heard of until my neighbour, who is on her feet all day, mentioned them to me over the fence.

They are a soft, cushioned, easy slip-on sandal. No fiddly buckles, no straps to wrestle with, you simply step into them. But the thing I noticed, the very first afternoon, is the sole. It is soft and giving underfoot, and it cradles the arch in a way that I genuinely was not prepared for. The first time I stood up in them I actually paused, because something I had braced for, that first sharp complaint from my feet, did not come.

I stood up, waited for the ache, and it simply was not there.

I wore them to the high street that first Saturday. Then to the garden. Then, almost without deciding to, to everything.

By the door, where they live now. The first pair that did not leave me aching.

The day I noticed

The morning it really landed, I had been out since just after nine. The post office, the chemist, a slow wander round the market, then a long stand in a queue at the bank that in the old days would have had me shifting my weight from foot to foot and counting the minutes.

And around lunchtime, sitting down at last with a cup of tea, I realised my feet were not aching. Not a little. Not at all. I had been on them for the better part of three hours and there was nothing. No throb, no burning at the ball of the foot, none of that dull weariness that used to start at my heels and climb.

I rang my daughter Emma, who is thirty four and lives in London, and I told her, and she went quiet, and then she said, "Mum, when did you last go a whole morning without mentioning your feet?" And the honest answer was that I could not remember.

"I will be honest, Mum," she said. "I have not heard you sound like this in years."

She ordered her own pair that evening. She ordered hers in the black.

→ Read about the Merella

What changed in a fortnight

I had not been looking for a miracle. I had been looking for a pair of sandals I could put on in the morning and forget about, and I had stopped believing such a thing existed for a foot like mine.

Three things I noticed in the first fortnight, and I wrote them down because I knew I would want to remember.

1. The cushioning is real. The sole is soft and forgiving, not the thin, flat, hard kind that leaves you feeling every paving slab. By the end of a long day my feet feel the same as they did at breakfast.

2. The support is there without me thinking about it. There is a gentle shape under the arch that holds the foot rather than letting it sprawl flat, and that, I think, is most of why the ache stopped climbing up into my knees.

3. They go with everything. I wear them with my linen trousers, with a summer dress, with cropped jeans to walk Poppy. They look like a proper sandal, not like something handed out at a hospital, and that mattered to me more than I would have admitted a year ago.

Graham, my husband, who notices nothing, noticed that I had started saying yes again. Yes to the long walk along the front. Yes to minding Lily, my granddaughter, at her swimming lesson and walking her the long way home after. Yes to a whole afternoon round the shops with my sister without once looking for somewhere to sit.

Now, about the price

I want to talk about the price, because it was the thing that almost stopped me from ordering. The Merella sandals for £43.95 is, frankly, suspicious. I sat at my kitchen table with a cup of tea in the garden and wrote down what I had paid, or seen, for a comfortable pair of sandals like these in the last few years.

• Hotter sandals, £79
• Clarks, £65
• Torquay Merella, £43.95

And underneath, in slightly larger letters, the only thing I could think to write. …how??

What I would tell you if we were friends

If we were in my garden with a cup of tea, and you had asked me whether you should order a pair, this is what I would say.

I would tell you that women our age have quietly been made to choose between a shoe that looks alright and a shoe that does not hurt, and that I had given up believing one shoe could be both. The Merella is both, and it has been a long time since I could say that about anything on my feet.

I would tell you that the creme is the pair I wear the most, the grey is the one my sister says is the most sensible, and the blue is the one I bought simply because it made me smile. I would tell you to order two. If you order two, the stack discount comes off, and if you do what I did, one pair will live by the back door and you will never want to be without them.

I would tell you that the popular sizes are already showing as almost sold out. The middle sizes went first when I checked again this morning. The anniversary sale ends when the sizes do.

If your feet have, for longer than you would like to admit, been quietly deciding how far you are allowed to walk and how long you are allowed to stand, please do not wait.

While your size is still in stock.

— Susan