PresentTense: Dunnes Stores has banned the use of Heelys in its shops, recent in-store incidents having convinced it that there are few things in life more bothersome than an eight-year-old shifting into fourth gear. It joins bans already rolled out in schoolyards and playgrounds across the country, and shopping centres across the world.
It is unlikely, though, to stop the rapid rise of the shoe that doubles as a rollerskate. For some time yet, us adults will have to continue our role as unwilling extras in a minipops version of Starlight Express.
Blame Roger Adams. Having grown up in his parents' skating rink, Heelys were the result of a midlife crisis, the one positive thing to come about from the collapse of his 21-year marriage.
It was 1998, and Adams was going through what he describes as the "bachelor-house-on-the-beach" phase of his post-divorce life - the phases of American divorce obviously being more fun than our European "anger, grief, acceptance" standard.
Watching kids skate past his beach house, the idea struck him. "The hair stood up on the back my neck," he recalls. For most of the rest of us, when the hair stands up on the back of our necks we shout for someone to shut the door. Not Adams. He went away and began hacking away at an old pair of Nikes, mating them with the amputated wheel from a pair of rollerskates until one day he hit upon a working prototype, and all across the world parents juddered with the cold realisation that someone, somewhere had come up with yet another way of taking money from them.
Heelys took a little while to become an epidemic, but this year have reached the tipping point. Sales have increased 10-fold in only a year. More than 100,000 are expected to be sold in Ireland in 2006. And that's not including the various knock offs and imitators Adams has spent a lot of money chasing down.
It seems that God missed both a design trick and a marketing opportunity when he didn't put wheels on our feet. The sole mission of recent generations of children has been to glide rather than walk. The advent of Heelys has meant that this has been dubbed the "walk and roll" generation. Rollerskates and rollerblades have been stages in their evolution; with the occasional detour into lolo balls, scooters and space hoppers. And just as the first words spoken by our ancestors when they walked upright were "my back's giving me jip", the Heelys epidemic is causing some safety concerns.
To be honest, you get the feeling that if legs had only recently been invented there would be somewhat of an outcry over their tendency to propel children into all sorts of trouble. A&E units would be complaining of being overrun with leg-related injuries, while tabloids would be decrying these bipedal deathtraps.
Nevertheless, a quick search through the newspapers reveals a few worrying stories. There is the case of a tragic 12-year-old in Boston who "heeled" into the path of an oncoming car. And Wexford General Hospital this summer treated a child brought in with a broken wrist having fallen from his Heelys. (One of Wexford's many fun-related accidents, as it happens. There have been several bouncy castle attacks this summer, with one adult admitted with a swollen ankle - and, presumably, a severely deflated sense of dignity.)
MEANWHILE, SURGEONS WARN that Heelys may cause ligament damage and inflammation of the foot tendons. And a study by a group of Singaporean paediatricians showed that 37 kids showed up in a local hospital in only a seven-month period, all having been wearing Heelys or their imitations when they had their accident. Doctors had treated a particularly high number of supracondylar elbow injuries. Sounds nasty - the kind of thing you'd want to get seen straight away by a lawyer.
Their nuisance value to those of us still going around on old-fashioned heels rather than new-fangled wheels means that Heelys are now banned in shopping centres and schools from South Africa to Canada, from Japan to my local Dunnes Stores. However, the shoe's most alarming danger is apparent in the news that they are appealing to adults in increasing numbers. Grown-ups appear not to have learned the lessons of fads past. Kids take to wheels with a natural grace and balance; when adults attempt to master any type of wheel-shoe combination, they tend only to become expert in the "crashing helicopter" routine.
The only hope is that they'll end up filed in wardrobes between the lolo ball and the pogo stick, although kids will have dumped them only in favour of rocket boots or hover shoes or some such thing. Yet, in a grasp for permanency, there is now the half-serious suggestion that "Heeling" could eventually become an Olympic event. After which, it'll only be a matter of time before Twister makes it in as a demonstration sport.
