And at the bottom of my wardrobe I found…

(Or, “Sometimes it pays to be a hoarder”)

In the very near future I’m heading to the Steppes Of Mongolia. To ride a horse. For two whole weeks. Squee!

As you might expect, I’ve been planning what to take for a while now. I don’t ride horses all that often, so I don’t have all the gear. One of the big question marks was over what shoes to wear. I didn’t want to go out and invest in riding boots, but I didn’t seem to have anything that fit the bill.

Except I did.

Have riding boots.

Already.

I kid you not. At the bottom of my wardrobe, carefully stored in the original, albeit dusty, box, was a pair of RM Williams riding boots.

RM Williams are an Australian brand — you could say they are the quintessential stockman’s boot. Well made. Hard wearing. Designed for horse riding…

I bought mine back when I was in my early 20s and wore them with jeans for a while. Then, because they weren’t especially comfortable for walking around in, or fashionable, I put them away and forgot about them; but I could never quite bring myself to throw them out.

And now that turns out to be a good thing.

I confess I do have hoarder tendencies. I don’t keep things that are completely useless, but I do find it hard to dispose of items that might prove handy one day… even if ‘one day’ never seems to come around.

(Recently I’ve been eying a stack of ‘gift’ boxes taking up space in my study. I really should get rid of them… I know I should get rid of them. But each of them would make such a great presentation box for a certain kind of present. So there they remain. Waiting.)

The boots I might reasonably have expected never to wear again, having ignored them for more than 20 years. I might reasonably have expected to have got rid of them long ago. Except I didn’t.

And now my decision to keep them has borne fruit! I took them to a bootmaker and got rubber soles fitted over the smooth leather (to give me some friction against the stirrups), and now I’m all set to go.

Not long to wait now!