Stocking feet a major impairment

Most rational thinkers would agree the main reason real estate is currently dormant is because open homes insist on punters taking their shoes off at the door.

I have no idea where this perplexing custom came from, though it probably dripped down the same pipe that told house sellers to bake fresh bread one hour before an open home begins, and to throw out all their furniture and hire flash new stuff to display a fine taste they don't actually have.

Nobody with fine taste would ever own a bad house.

There are a number of reasons why I despise taking off my shoes at the door. Time is money, and I am stiff of joint, unlacing and lacing up shoes takes me a long time, time I could spend far more productively elsewhere.

Hence I have taken to just kicking my shoes off, and then whanging my feet back in when I leave.

However, as I only buy cheap shoes whose backs are made of cheap Taiwanese cardboard, not leather, or even plastic, my shoes are soon ruined by doing this.

Another reason is theft. Any well-researched shoe thief will know which open homes are running a shoes-off policy on any given day, and really, who knows how many thousands of pairs of shoes are being lost every year in this way.

The cops keep it quiet because they never tell you how thieves work. The very absence of statistics on shoe thefts confirms the cops are at their wits' end.

But my main objection to removing shoes is because never once in my life have I ever worn a pair of socks the same colour. The belief that socks should have the same colour for each foot is one of the great retail larcenies of our time - it forces us to buy in pairs when only one new sock is ever needed.

We don't buy two fridges when one fridge breaks down, we buy one. Why do the sock sellers get away with making us buy them in twos?

I must have walked along our main street nearly six million times in my life and never once has anyone lifted up my trousers to check both socks are the same colour. Nobody cares.

Fortunately, I have found a way to avoid humiliation at open homes - I just put down the name of somebody loathsome on that piece of paper the realtor makes you sign. I have been Paul Henry at six hundred open homes.

But last week I got hit in an entirely different way. We were invited to morning tea at a gorgeous rural retreat high above Northeast Valley. Splendid people, wonderful food, scintillating conversation, it was probably the most enjoyable morning tea of my entire life.

But for reasons I suspect may be aligned to a strain of Buddhism, we had to take our shoes off at the door. I've worn worse sock matches than on this day, but as my wife pointed out to me in a tone I could only describe as hissing, one was blue and one was black.

I managed to walk down to the lounge in a stumbling one-foot-closely-after-another kind of way, but once on the sofa, seated with one foot on top of the other to give the illusion of one sock colour, I was rooted. While everyone else worked the room, walked out on to the deck, smiled at the sun and trotted around the side of the house to inspect a reputedly stunning sheep called Henry, I remained impaled, unable to move an inch.

"Come and see the sheep, Roi," they said. "I have seen sheep before," I replied.

"We have a place in Central Otago."

We stayed two hours, before I inched back to the safety of my Converse sneakers at the door.

I really did want to see Henry, he sounded like a top animal. If taking off shoes at the front door was illegal, then I could have. And then, even better, house prices would go up again.

• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.