I don’t know about you, but I seem to have spent a lot of my life repeating the mantra: Life’s too short. Whether it is washing up as you go along, or cleaning out the boot of the car, or staying in touch with people I used to be friendly with but drifted away from (none of whom, I rush to add, are reading this blog), I have always been very ready to conclude that life’s too short to bother with that; I have far more important things to do…such as sorting my blue socks from my black, or completing today’s Quordle.

Numbered in recent decades among the things I believed life was too short for was foot care. I can offer two arguments in my defence. First, the concept that my feet needed taking care of was novel to me: for my first four or five decades, my feet seemed perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. They didn’t bother me, and so I saw no reason to bother them, Second, just at the time that my feet started to become an eyesore, I was seeing less and less of them, because they seldom peeked out from under the cover of my corporation. When I did start to notice them, the simple solution was to wear closed-toed sandals, and spare the world’s sensibilities.

Then, a couple of years ago, Bernice started expressing a reluctance to share a bed with my feet, and I decided to give them a long, hard look, I found that I didn’t actually want to share a bed with them either, and so, overcoming a certain Neanderthal instinct that footcare was a sure sign of a testosterone deficiency, I booked myself in for a pedicure. Discovering that what I wanted was called a medical pedicure offered me a comforting figleaf.

Over the following months, my life was transformed. My chiropodist was able to assure me that her footstool was constantly occupied by the deformed toes of countless men of a certain age dragged to her treatment room by their disgusted wives. Within a short time, I was able to see genuine improvement in the condition of my feet. As a bonus, once I had managed to more or less control the extreme ticklishness of my tootsies, I found the pampering care very soothing.

After many months, the condition of my feet was so improved that I felt able to once again unveil my toes to a waiting world, and so I treated myself to a decent pair of open-toed sandals. Since I live in sandals for about eight months of the year, I looked for a sturdy and well-made pair. In one of our local shops, I found just what I was looking for. The shop manager – a man almost my age – was wearing an identical pair and told me how reliable, hard-wearing and comfortable they were. I was convinced, and, always a good sign, decided to go home wearing my new sandals, and carrying my old, closed-toed ones.

For the rest of that season, I scarcely took the sandals off, and I couldn’t wait to start wearing them again this spring. After a long, hard spring, summer, autumn, they were showing little sign of wear: the soles are hardly worn, and the beige leather has resisted scuffs reasonably well. So, as soon as the season turned, I resumed wearing them, as my toes revelled in their newly regained freedom.

However – and you surely knew there was going to be a ‘however’ – after I had worn them for a couple of days, I discovered that the Velcro grip that secures the heel-strap started working loose. I would be striding down the street, only to discover that one sandal was flip-flopping off my foot. No matter how firmly I clamped the Velcro tightly closed again, it would keep working loose. When I complained to Bernice, she pointed out that this always happens with Velcro after a time. The hooks of the one piece of Velcro keep latching onto random little pieces of loopy fluff floating around, leaving insufficient hooks free to actually latch onto the loopy piece of Velcro. I bowed to her greater experience, reflecting, as it did, the hard-won world-weary wisdom of a woman who spent much of the last decades of her working life refastening the Velcro straps of twenty-five four-year-olds’ sandals.

As yet unperturbed, I revisited our local shoe-shops, in search of a pair of sandals with a heel-buckle. What I quickly discovered is that there ain’t no such thing. In the name of progress, the labour-saving, instant-close, one-handed-fasten Velcro strip is the only option available.

I am old enough to remember the period when Velcro first took off commercially, which was not until just after the patent taken out by George de Mestral in 1958 expired in 1978. It was in 1941 that he had first been intrigued by the way that burrs stuck to the coat of his dog and to the fabric of his own clothes, and, under the microscope, seen how the hooks of the burr attached to the loops in the fabric. But before he could produce Velcro commercially, he first had to develop a new machine to duplicate those loops and hooks.

The fashion industry, to de Mestral’s disappointment, spurned the new product as bulky and ugly, and the first commercial application of note was in astronauts’ clothing, Velcro being so much easier to fasten and unfasten than buttons or zips when wearing thick gloves. Gradually, other non-clothing applications were discovered, such as airline-seat headrest anti-macassars. In 1984, demonstrating its properties was still considered enough of a novelty to be legitimate content for The David Letterman Show. It was around this time that manufacturers of both children’s clothing and toys and games started using Velcro more widely.

And now, at least in my neck of the woods, Velcro has beaten out the opposition in men’s sandals, despite the fact that it breaks down after a year, and leaves you with no option but to buy a new pair of sandals. You can’t clean the fluff off the Velcro. You can’t even take your sandals to a little, old, balding shoe-repairer, with an off-white full-length apron, a workshop that smells of leather and glue, a beautifully shaped and aged wooden last, a mouthful of tacks, a delicate hammer and a pair of half-moon glasses perched on the end of his nose.

It strikes me that this is just one example of what increasingly passes for progress these days, when it is actually nothing other than sales generation. We bought a new ceiling fan with integral light fitment for our salon a while ago. After a few days, we decided that we really needed a stronger light, and so I removed the glass shade to check what kind of fixture the bulb needed to be. I discovered, to my horror, that, rather than a bulb, the light was provided by an LED unit. This unit resembled a small section of the console of Apollo 11, and so, when we next needed an electrician, we also asked him to take a look at the ceiling fan, and tell us what we needed to buy. He removed the shade, took one look, and informed us that it was a sealed unit that could not be replaced. So, we decided to live with subdued lighting. Fortunately, the ceiling fan itself is both elegant and efficient.

When, a few weeks later, the LED unit first faded and then, after a couple of days of grudging intermittent illumination, finally died, we realized we would have to return the entire unit to the shop to be exchanged under guarantee. The wiring, of course, was far from straightforward and I am no longer as devil-may-care as I was when, near the start of our married life, I snipped through a live wire with pliers and sent myself recoiling across the room. So, replacing the unit would inevitably involve paying an electrician to remove the unit (250 shekels), driving an hour to Rehovot (where, for reasons that I won’t go into here, I bought it in the first place), arguing with the store (‘You’ve been using this light, haven’t you!’), eventually, if I was lucky, getting a replacement, driving an hour back home (50 shekels in petrol for the round trip), paying an electrician to refit the unit (250 shekels), and expecting to have to repeat the whole sorry procedure every few months thereafter.

In the end, we just went to IKEA and bought two standard lamps (75 shekels each). We now have the ability to vary the room lighting almost infinitely (with each lamp having an upward general light and an adjustable reading spot-lamp); I can have enough light to read without Bernice feeling that she has stumbled into a marijuana greenhouse. In addition, we have saved ourselves 400 shekels, and a trip to Rehovot. Best of all, these lamps use light bulbs, which can be replaced even by me at minimal risk of electrocution,

I could go on, and talk about batteries, which used to be sold individually, and now come in ‘handy’ packs of ten, or, if you are really lucky, five, which means that you can attempt to open the pack without ripping it, fail, because the handy, improved, see-through plastic cannot be opened cleanly, take out the one battery you need, discover that the pack is not resealable, and put it in the kitchen drawer where two batteries will roll out of the unresealable pack and hide until next Pesach in the back left-hand corner of the drawer, one of the other batteries will corrode in the condensation of the kitchen, and the last one will frustratingly turn out to be an AA when you next need an AAA, or, for the sake of variety, an AAA when you next need an AA.

Clearly, ‘handy’ is a word the meaning of which has changed in the last few decades.

However, there are still some things that come in small, and even not so small, packages, and that are the very best.