#1: get a pedicure and a manicure

I’m not chiraptophobic: indeed, I love being touched, but you try and find the name for a phobia of someone hurting your fingernails or judging your feet and get right back to me. I’m starting off the bucket list with an easy win – one that I wasn’t planning on completing so quickly but sometimes opportunity knocks and you have to answer. I was skulking outside my barbers, waiting for the chap who usually does my beard to become free (he had some other whore in the chair, but such is the nature of the parasocial relationship we have), when I spotted that right next door was a ‘nails place’. It’s not actually called that, but if I gave you the actual name you’d be able to find out exactly where I live and I don’t need any more competition for the heart of my barber. Plus the owner is one of those people who spell their very traditional name with about eight superfluous extra letters and, almost doubtlessly, a tiny love-heart in place of the tittle on their ‘i’.

I’ve never really considered a manicure bar the odd flirtation with ‘treating myself’ but I do have a somewhat fraught relationship with my fingernails: they help me to grip things, I repay them by chewing at them when I’m bored and picking little bits off the side when I’m stressed. I essentially treat my hands like a literal finger buffet and I feel I owe them more than that. Years of nibbling and cutting them with the kitchen scissors have left them looking rougher than my genteel typing job may at first suggest. Similarly, my feet: I occasionally remember to cut them when I can reach them and they’re responsible for more holes in my socks than could be considered decent, but generally, they seem to tick along without much fuss. That said, one of my earliest medical memories was having an ingrown toenail removed by a doctor who, despite the tears of the panicked six year old in front of him, exercised a level of compassion and care you’d ordinarily get from someone trying to tear open a pack of bacon with wet hands. I remember him saying it wouldn’t hurt a bit but I’ll tell you this: my circumcision as an adult was less painful, and I got to wear a salad bowl over my genitals for three days. I never trusted that doctor again and as an indirect result, I hate people touching my feet. That goes some way to explaining why my ingrown toenail became a recurring theme through my childhood: I’d make such a fuss about my parents cutting my nails that I’d try and do it myself, leading to poor workmanship.

Things came to a head during the summer of 1998 on a family holiday to Fayence, France. This was back in the day when my parents would bundle us into a smoke-filled car, drive about 72 hours taking turns to sleep, smoke and drive and then deposit us somewhere sunny, with only a mild bout of emphysema to trouble ourselves with. We used to travel all around Scotland – which was lovely, if perennially damp – so an international driving holiday was a terribly exciting business, even to a 13 year old boy who had only recently discovered the art of masturbation and wanted to be left alone with his thoughts at any given moment.

How exotic it had all seemed: fighting with my sister on the ‘wrong’ side of the road, fighting with my sister at various aire de repos on the way, fighting with my sister in a Carrefour whilst my parents busied themselves buying cheese or stocking up on cigarettes lest they smoked their way through their reserves of 2,000 in the boot. ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même’ you may say, to which I would confidently reply ‘Oui. J’mappelle James. J’habite dans une petite maison’ and then start crying.

A couple of days before our road trip I had confided in my parents that my ingrown toenail had returned with gusto – my big toe was as red as a postbox and was kicking out so much heat you could have used it to light a cigarette, which is perhaps why my parents kept me onboard. My mother promised to keep an eye on it with all the medical care you would expect from someone who, when I fell off my bike and landed on my face, wrapped up the worst of my burst lips and newly jagged nose with a tea-towel and hoped for the best. To this day my nose points noticeably to the left and frankly it’s lucky I don’t have a cocaine habit because it would be like trying to snort a line through the tippy maze on Screwball Scramble. If I am prone to catastrophising my health, my mother is the opposite: I could have come downstairs one day with a missing leg and she would have told me it was just a passing cold and sent me to school with a flea in my ear. I make her sound callous and unfeeling but to be fair to her, I’m not dead.

I spent most of the journey down picking away at the ingrown toenail and making it altogether much worse, something I do even now as an adult if there’s anything wrong with me. If I have an ache in my side I will prod and jab and knead at it until the skin changes colour and I can turn ashen-faced to my husband and proclaim ‘it’s getting worse, I should go to the walk-in centre’. He, like my mother, will point out it’s all my own doing and I should just get on with it. Going back to my toe, I somehow managed to hobble around for five days (masturbation took the edge off it) before the situation resolved itself in the market town of Montauroux, where we had decamped to take advantage of their Sunday market.

This involved a lot of walking around in the blazing summer heat and for all that I was endlessly complaining about my sore toe, I wasn’t going to risk missing out on any freebies, so I bravely soldiered on. An hour or so passed and I was busy trying to find somewhere quiet when a very large, very unapologetic French lady stepped back from a stall and stood on my swollen toe, which promptly burst. Perhaps in retrospect it didn’t exactly burst – remember, I was 13 and prone to histrionics – but the sudden application of pressure forced all the gunk right out. I took my sock off and it looked as though I’d squashed a tomato between my toes. I have never felt relief on that scale ever again in my life, and listen, I’ve driven out of Blackpool more than once. I took the opportunity to dig out the tiny shard of toenail that had been causing all the problems because thirteen year old me was absolutely rock and after a good wipe I was back in business. We did have to drive back with the windows down and a wheel of Pont l’Évêque warming on the dashboard to take the edge off the smell of my trainers.

Since that fateful day I’ve had several reoccurrences of the ingrown toenail but never quite on such a biblical scale and, for the most part, as long as I cut my toenails sensibly and don’t buy cheap trainers, I get along. I still don’t care for the sight of my feet however. My right foot is fine: all the toes are in the right order, the dorsum isn’t too hairy and weirdly, the foot isn’t ticklish in the slightest. My left foot, on the other hand, looks like it has been rendered by psychotic AI. I’ve got hair growing on the side, an entire beard growing out of the big toe and for good measure, the toes themselves are all out of order. My little toe is the worst: it resembles a pink midget gem and is missing a nail. I’m also incredibly ticklish on that side only: put my socks on in the wrong way and I’m likely to kick my trainer over the roof.

I’m not self-conscious about my feet – I don’t doubt I could put them on onlyfans and take a foot-fetishest for a trip to the moon – but you can perhaps understand why I’ve been reluctant to take them for a pedicure. I didn’t want the poor manicurist wincing and dodging sparks as they set about my trotters with an angle-grinder. However, with the nail shop literally in front of me it would have been rude to dodge the opportunity to scratch off one of the bucket list, and so I went in.

As you might have anticipated, there was of course nothing to worry about. I enjoyed the manicure far more than the pedicure simply because during that I spent too long worrying whether my feet, freshly showered mind you, were kicking out a pong, but the chap manhandling them didn’t seem worried. I’m sure the stuffing of burning herbs into his mask was purely coincidental. Various fresh-smelling embrocation were rubbed into my trotters, the pads were buffed like he was trying to bring the shine back to an antique dresser and my nails were clipped in such a fashion that they don’t catch on my socks any longer. It was a genuine treat and although I’ll probably just go back to accordioning my belly fat and clipping my toenails myself, I am glad I gave it a go. I remembered as Paul and I were having dinner later that Paul hadn’t seen my newly beautiful feet but he didn’t seem as excited as I was when I shoved them in his face over the top of his lasagne. He can be a cruel sort.

The manicure was far easier – sit in a chair and watch as someone clips and buffs and polishes my fingernails in short order, occasionally putting whichever hand wasn’t being kept busy in a little warm water bath. It was like a tiny spa. There was a moment of alarm when I heard what sounded exactly like a dentist drill whirr excitedly into life but turns out it was just a tiny buffer designed to take 39 years of accumulated muck out of my cuticles. Once I stopped panicking it didn’t hurt too much and we cracked on.

One thing that became immediately apparent however was my inability to follow instruction about how to position my body remains strong. By way of example, the manicurist would grip my hand and try and rotate it so that he could get to my thumb, I’d immediately pull in the opposite direction or ball up my fist or get confused and try and wedge my second hand in the water bath. I just can’t do it. There have been certain ‘romantic’ situations over the years where this has become an issue: someone trying to pop me into a more comfortable or accessible situation has found it’s like trying to corral a cow through a hedge maze. It’s almost as though my brain gets itself in a tizzy trying to work out what the other person wants and then decides it has had enough of the whole situation and hits the randomizer button. Thankfully the manicurist was endlessly patient and although the beads of sweat on his forehead suggested otherwise, we both had a wonderfully stress-free time.

Oh: he did ask whether I wanted a colour on my nails and although I thought about it, I elected instead for a clear gel to keep the nails strong. I spent a heady summer of my later teens wearing coloured nail varnish because I saw Brian Molko on the telly with black nails and thought that was a look I could get in front of, little realising that you need the whole goth look in order to pull it off with any sort of aplomb. I just looked like a fat kid who had caught his fingers in the cupboard door in his haste to get the crisps out. If I do go back I’ll consider it simply because it’ll give the neighbours something new to scrinch their noses about but until then, my nails remain pink, if amazingly shiny.

So that’s the first bucket list item crossed off, and I am glad to make a start. It may not have been the most exciting of tasks but I think it’s an excellent representation of what this list is all about for me – checking off the little things I’ve always fancied or thought about but never quite gotten around to doing, and in checking it off, pushing myself a tiny bit beyond my comfort zone. Whilst I’ve never agonised over the what-ifs and what-could-go-wrongs of a manicure, the idea has always left me a little bit uncomfortable, and now I’m done and have wonderful nails. I can sit and pick my bum without fear, and isn’t that what a life well lived is truly all about?

In other list news: I have started to make good progress on two more activities which will (hopefully) bear fruit a little down the line. One of them involved eating a small tube of Pringles, so is already a clear winner. On we go then.

List progress: 1/39

9 October 2023