I was at primary school when I first noticed that the elastic ribbing at the top of my school socks was leaving an indentation all the way round my sizeable calves. Mum’s efforts to conceal her legs confirmed that slim pins were unlikely to come my way and family photographs never boasted any females with legs up to their armpits. I had to face it, my genes were against me. Just my luck.
The fashion for miniskirts and even worse, hotpants in the 1960s era of my youth, were obviously created to taunt those of us with rugger knees into feeling even more self-conscious. Even in my teens, searching for long boots with a wider calf was a depressing experience. I can still feel the humiliation in shoe shops of trying to force the zip up over my chunky calves without success, the pitying expression on the assistant’s face while in desperation she offered me a pair of three-quarter length granny style snow boots.
When I moaned about my chunky legs to my mother, she’d say, “Ah well you can’t have everything and just think, you’ll never be blown over at the bus stop!” She implied that a long flared skirt covered a multitude of sins and hey presto, by the 1970s maxi length skirts had arrived and so finally the chunky legged had a temporary reprieve.
My legs were (and still are), by far my worst physical feature. However, they were reliable and carried me over many Northumbrian hills with my Ramblers club when I was in my twenties. They didn’t object to cycling or swimming, though the latter involved a speedy dash into the water before my lumps and bumps could be observed too closely. Eight years clambering up and down Edinburgh’s steep cobbled streets and tenement stairways was a good test on my leg muscles so it would seem fair that all this exertion would entitle me to have reasonably lithe limbs, but oh no, not a chance. I was an average size, slightly pear shaped and blessed with a washboard stomach, but it didn’t make an ounce of difference to my lardy legs. The dreaded blue lines replicating an ordnance survey map arrived early aggravated by pregnancies and despite a couple of bold attempts to disperse them on the operating table, they slyly returned.
In the 1990s I discovered DuoBoots, a boot store that catered for customers with calves in seven sizes from the skinny to the stumpy! At last, alongside many other bare legged frustrated females who had been boot deprived for thirty years or more, I had the option of a dozen pairs of fashionable boots that actually fitted.
My legs are still like a blancmange but are serving me well and I’ve managed to keep them out of sight of the general public fairly successfully over several decades. The only exposure exceptions were bouts of bursitis after knee strain, a hip replacement and of course swimming. Pity those Victorian beach bathing machines aren’t still around.
I was pondering my genetic misfortune at a local bus stop one day when my perspectives received a jolt by the sight of a young lass a fraction of my age gliding past on her disability scooter. Suddenly I was appalled by my pathetic whining and thanked God for two functioning legs, albeit well marked, short, stout and stumpy and that, so far, have at least prevented me from….. being blown over at the bus stop!
