65) Red Wellington Boots

I have a pair of bright red wellington boots. I don’t often wear them as my husband refuses to be seen with me when I do. They are very useful to wear when I go and do my bush regeneration duties around the lagoon near our home. Particularly when, like yesterday we have had a great deal of rain and the ground is soft and muddy, (great for pulling out the weeds but rather messy.) Some of the other people I do bush regeneration with tease me a little about my bright red boots but, as they admit, they will never lose me and I say I could hide away from them in the strawberry patch undetected if I want to.

There is a little story behind my boots. When we were living in Durban Jonny met up with an old school friend from his days in Kitwe, Northern Rhodesia, named Ian. He often came to visit us and they spent many happy times remembering the “good old days”. Ian was between jobs when he first contacted us but shortly after that he got a job in a factory that made rubber boots. On one visit he was telling me about his new job and the products that they manufactured. I laughingly asked why they did not make adult wellies in red or blue as I had only seen them is children’s sizes and would love a pair of bright red ones and he promised to find out why.

The next time I saw Ian he told me that he had asked the factory manager about the adult coloured wellies and he had been told that they had made them at one time but had discontinued the line, as there was no call for them. Apparently woman had no desire to wear bright red boots. I said I thought that that was a pity as I thought that they could cheer up a dark rainy day and we had a laugh and forgot all about it.

A little while later Ian arrived with a large plastic bag and said that they had been having a big clean up of some old storerooms in the factory and he had come across a pair of bright red wellies in my size and the factory manager had said that he could have them. So I got my red wellies free of charge.

The name of the factory was something like Neptune so all their products had style names with a sea theme. Things like Dolphins, Starfish, Coral, Mediterranean, Shark, and the style name for Red Wellington boots was ‘Marina’. So my boots have ‘Marina’ embossed on the soles. I really think that that is something else; I bet even Paris Hilton does not have her name embossed on the soles of her wellies.