Toes!

I’m still not back running yet, so the blog has been even quieter than it would have been because of Christmas.  Anyway, my back is getting better so I still believe that I can be running again soon.  In preparation for this, I have been doing an audit of my legs to check that they will be ready for the shock of going faster (not much) than plain walking.  Consequently, my thoughts turn to my knees, ankles, feet and arrive at my toes.

Toes account for 14 of the 26 bones that are found in each foot.  The smaller toes each have three bones, while the big toe just has two.  If you had asked me how many bones there are in a toe half an hour ago, I wouldn’t have had a clue.  Such is the wonder of the internet.  I suppose I could have counted the bones in my toes, but I would have had to take my socks off to be sure I was doing it right.

I think ‘big toe’ is one of my favourite names for a part of the body – it’s just so plain and simple.  It’s as if people were really imaginative with other bits of the body (stirrup, anvil, duodenum, etc) but by the time they reached the feet they just gave up.  It’s a toe, it’s big… yeah, whatever.

Big toes provided Albert Einstein with one of the first major problems of the universe that required his attention.  As a youngster he realised that the big toe was the culprit for any hole that developed in a sock.  Einstein analysed the issue and came up with an elegant solution:  he stopped wearing socks.  As well as enabling him to count the bones in his toes with more certainty than his hosed friends, this success may have given him enough confidence to start on bigger problems such as the universe and all it contains.  Never mind the brain,  E = mc² might never have happened if it wasn’t for big toes.

While science clearly owes a huge debt to toes, great literature is rather reticent. Shakespeare did find space for a toe in Hamlet:  “The age is grown so picked that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe.”  I was following it quite nicely until I got to the galling of the kibe.    Peasants’ toes getting near courtiers’ heels sounds like social mobility in action to me, but apparently it’s something to do with peasants copying the way those further up the class ladder speak.  It’s part of a conversation between Hamlet and at least one gravedigger. 

I do hope the gravedigger didn’t drop his shovel on Hamlet’s toes.  Injuries to toes, technically known as ‘stubbing’ are always incredibly painful for a horrible instant, but also act as a catalyst for some truly entertaining exercise.  The person stubbing their toe immediately starts to hop about on their uninjured foot in a wild, unco-ordinated way, a bit like a clumsy child on a pogo stick.  From personal experience the most common time of the day to stub a toe is first thing in the morning.  As a way to get the adrenaline flowing it’s a bit of a bummer, but the improvised dance routine that goes with it is a handy way to wake the rest of the house up.  Although alarm clocks are better really.