I never thought about it much until my Cousin S put it in perspective in the most horribly graphic form ever.

She said you need to have house shoes because the shoes that you wear outside on the asphalt and in the plazas get covered with spit, urine, vomit and those things ought not to be in your house. "Arrrgh! TMI!" I said, "oh, too graphic!"

Please people, don't mind that when you look at the bottom of the shoes you don't see vermin from outside plastered about. They are still there waiting and lurking to pounce on to your floor and take residence in your home and god help you if you have children or if you use the floor on occasion in a heated moment with your significant other.

To soothe my disgust, I shared this with My Friend P who too screamed "good lord!" and plugged his ears with his fingers. After vomiting inside a bit ourselves at the graphic thought of the germs we let into our homes without visas, P and I then got all practical.

Home hygiene

Cousin S, as painful as it is for us to admit it, is right. Home hygiene in modern-day earth does require that we look very carefully at the germ vehicles that we allow to come parading through our homes under the guise of protectors of the feet of our family and friends.

House slippers

Seriously, one should not allow shoes, even when they appear harmless, which they all do, to come caressing our home floors without reason.

Each home needs to have home slippers. Home slippers never ever leave the house for any reason whatsoever and your visiting friends need to travel with a pair or stand outside and smile and chat. Obviously, if it is a popular visitor, then they must have a pair of resident 'homie' shoes or flip-flops to be in the closet of your home.

Anyone else, tough titty! If they can't conform, then barefoot it must be.

Smelly feet

Hmm, but then this raises another question. There are some people with some smelly, fungi feet. what do we do with them? Which is better in the house, shoes with spit, urine and vomit or feet with cheesy fungi? My Friend P said the jury is out on that one.

Of course I did point out to Cousin S and some other friends at the office who, after careful thought, voted for the spit, vomit et al combination. The thinking is that Lamisil and those other fungi treatments are so expensive and take such doses to fix that it is best to stay away from any portion of the foot-and-mouth disease. So, no bare feet in the house, oh no!

Screening of family/friends

Of course, the other real thing that you could do is screen your friends and family to start with and make sure that they do not have cheesy, fungi feet.

Or, I see a great business idea popping up where we could sell home-safe shoe-sole wipes just for the visitor who would wipe his/her shoes with a quick-dry disinfectant wipe before entering any home.

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