LUV & HAT: Love and hate and hilarious disagreements • PED EGGS

PED EGGS

LUV - Let’s not beat around the bush, ladies and gentlemen, feet are fucking awful. Basically they’re scaly deformed HANDS garnished with horns and corns and irregularly sprouting hair. At best, feet look like undercooked pancakes full of chicken bones. At worst, they smell like Belgium.

As you might have guessed, I am a fully paid-up podophobe. I fucking hate feet and, of course, the podes I phobe the most are my own. Because I have the partially collapsed, war-torn feet of an ex-dancer run to fat – part barnacle, part monkey paw and part upsettingly mutated Ripley clone in Alien Resurrection.

In fact, they’re not strictly human feet so much as rebellious HOOVES, and taming them (and I must, for Havaiana season is upon us) involves tricking my feet into the bathroom by pretending that I’m going shopping for Converse, then launching a three-pronged ambush with a pumice stone, a foot file and an industrial vat of that vile Body Shop peppermint foot cream* stuff until their spirit is broken.

But all that’s behind me now that I have a PED EGG. I no longer have to balance miserably on the edge of my bath, set my jaw like a stoic lumberjack and saw away at my stumps with sandpaper for a day and a half. With a PED EGG, I buff my way to public-friendly feet in minutes. It’s amazing. It’s so easy. For someone like me, whose rebellious hooves are now gently dozing Andrex puppies, it’s life changing.

And of course, it’s horribly, horribly disgusting.

I mean, you’re cheese-grating your feet and collecting the shavings like some terrible milky sociopath. But you empty that shit and wash it afterwards, because using a PED EGG is one of those disgusting things – like smear tests, like being nice to your mum’s creepy younger male friend who wears a fucking SHARK TOOTH PENDANT - that you get over and just deal with. Because you’re an adult.

Not convinced? Here are five everyday things that are more disgusting than using a PED EGG:

So, bon appetit and sweet dreams! What was my point again? Oh yeah. PED EGG! Get over it, have nice feet. LUV.

* I’m such a podophobe that typing the words “foot cream” triggered my gag reflex.
- Robyn Wilder

HAT - Life is basically one horrible letdown after another. We discovered this as children when - after watching the adverts promising that Teddy Ruxpin would be our charismatic new best friend - we realised that he was actually just a hairy cassette player that looked like Michael J Fox if Teen Wolf was a film about a rapist toddler’s battle against progressive cerebrovascular degeneration.

We discovered it again when - after believing that it could revolutionise the world of commerce - we realised that Groupon was actually just a sick experiment to see how many harrowingly inept daily emails about laser hair removal a person will voluntarily read before they die of sadness.

Yet still we believe. Thus, the Ped Egg. The Ped Egg looked like a miracle invention - a beautifully effective way to banish hard skin from your feet forever. Not only would the Ped Egg stop my feet from looking like leathery, yellowing planks of stinking driftwood, but it would help them become as smooth as a silken bag of eels. By using the Ped Egg a few times, I was sure that I’d end up with such aristocratic and velvety feet that I could cause them irreparable damage just by looking at them quite hard.

Better yet, all the dead skin removed by the Ped Egg’s 135 precision micro-files get stored up in a little container. Imagine that! A little container full of dead foot skin! What a wheeze that would be! Maybe I could convince people that it was parmesan, or sea monkey eggs, or makeshift confetti for last-minute weddings. That little container of dead foot skin would be my fortune! The Ped Egg was going to change my life!

And then I used one.

And then I fucking used one.

Turns out that Ped Eggs are fucking HORRIFIC.

First, using one means you have to look at your feet, which is no fun. AT ALL. Turns out I’ve got feet that look like baby elephant corpses. They look like Gollum’s nutsack. They look like sad clowns without any makeup on. Looking at my feet is a genuinely unpleasant experience.

Then you actually have to use the fucker. You’re basically zesting a lemon here, if lemons were big and flat and sweaty and covered in scar tissue and stank like rancid milk. And you can never get all the hard skin off your feet with a Ped Egg. You end up with a foot that’s part smooth, part hard, and part worn down all the way to the bone.

And worst of all, it turns out that a container full of dead foot skin stops being funny the second it becomes a reality. Because it’s not skin. It’s dust. It’s manky beige dust. It looks a bit like anthrax, only it’s worse than anthrax because it’s MADE OF FEET. Looking at a container of your own foot dust is one of the most upsetting things that a human being can do. You want to see what Ped Egg foot dust looks like, don’t you? Don’t lie. I know that you do. Well, fine. Here it is.

Oh, you’re welcome.
- Stuart Heritage