Saturday 28 January 2017

Jandal (January)

Argument rages in New Zealand over who invented the jandal, preferred January footwear of undocumented myriads of the population. Was it Morris Yock, importer of the refashioned zori, or Japanese sandal? Or his colleague, Des Cowie of Taranaki? Representatives of both families fight wars of words over their place in the footnotes of history. Australia, meanwhile, is riven by the question: thongs or flip-flops? The thong crowd have the numbers historically, while flip-flops are a British, or worse American, import of the past forty years. That’s not a long time, given the ancient Egyptians wore them forty hundred years ago.

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