This is a clip from the BBC show called The Young Ones. MTV used to play episodes of The Young Ones and I used to watch them religiously. This clip is called Doctor Martin’s Boots. It was the first time I had ever heard of Doc Martins. I scoured the shoe stores of Salt Lake City fruitlessly looking for the elusive Doctor Martin’s Boots.

In 1987, I finally found them in one of Mike Pinkston’s skateboard magazines. I could mail order them for $75. I had never mail ordered footwear before and I was not about to pay seventy-five bucks for shoes, no matter how cool they were. Instead, I just bought myself a pair of steel-toed work boots on clearance at K-Mart and pretended that they were Doc Martins.

When they finally showed up in Salt Lake City, they were STILL too expensive for me to afford on my college budget, plus my old boots had always been good enough to fool the dorks in Salt Lake City. Weren’t REAL steel-toed boots more punk than Doc Martins, anyway?

It wasn’t until years later when I was married to Mike that I found my first pair of REAL Doc Martins at a price I could afford. TJ Maxx had them on sale for $45. It was a lot of money at the time, but I was willing to pay it to finally have a pair of “Doctor Martin’s Boots.” Of course, by then I was nearly graduated from college, married two years and well on my way to losing all the punk that was in me. All that’s left now is these boots, dusty from disuse.

It finally snowed here. Maybe I’ll wear my Doc Martin’s to shovel the walk…