Here's to Lighty-Up-Slipper-Man

It’s like that with my wife’s twinkly Betty Boop slippers. If I’d been at the board meeting when the idea was first mooted, I’d have struggled to keep a straight face.

It’s the sort of idea that smacks of desperation, like Alan Partridge suggesting Monkey Tennis in a vain effort to maintain the interest of a bored TV channel commissioner.

Imagine if Lighty-Up-Slipper Man had been a contestant on the reality TV show Dragon’s Den. He’d have been universally panned for wasting the panel’s time on puerile nonsense.

I bought them as a joke for my wife’s birthday, realising it would be mildly amusing to watch her pad around the house with twinkling red lights illuminating her every step.

They were intended as a novelty add on. . . not the main present at all. Now it's two months on and she's long since forgotten about the overpriced perfume I stumped up for, but we still both chuckle at the slippers.

Occasionally I’ll borrow them under the lame pretence that the kitchen floor is cold. Once I even wore them to go outside late at night to retrieve my mobile phone from the car, secretly hoping that the neighbours would catch a glimpse of my fancy flashing footwork.

They say little things please little minds but nothing could be further from the truth. Slippers that light up for no apparent or practical reason are the work of a genius. . . someone capable of connecting with the child in all of us, however grown up we might think we are.

It’s easy to pooh-pooh a new idea, but much harder to come up with one. And the older and more cynical we become, the less likely we are to see the value in something that is useless.

There is no earthly reason why my wife’s slippers require lights. . . and yet the lights were the only reason I bought them.

Lighty-Up Slipper-Man, I salute you!