brr

Whilst my recent experience with Vibram has been principally on the soles of Merrell trainers it was always handy that the (replaceable, back in the days when that was standard) soles of my walking boots were made of such nice grippiness, though it did sort of spoil other sole-material for me as they were simply nowhere near as effective. When I stopped travelling to work wearing Vibram-soled trainers and started leaving a pair of inferiorily-soled things at work for lunchwalks I had to start taking care on corners in the wet almost as much as would be necessary when popping for a lunchwalk wearing stupid office-shoes. Whilst they're not really designed for people with five toes my most recent bicycle-shoes are also handily Vibramic and allowed me to skip up and down an icy slope carrying luggage from the car to the chalet without really having to think about the relatively low coefficient of friction normally available on snow-covered ice. This was in marked contrast to the three-hour journey through the snow in the car, when it's impossible to not be constantly terrified at how much less grippy than Vibram the tyres are and how much less able to adapt to a range of shapes and slopes of surface a car wheel is compared to the human foot and how a car lacks the articulation necessary to move some of its mass around its centre of rotation in the event of a loss of traction. Still, we got there in the end, though confirmation bias of this kind does not mean the journey was safe in the slightest.