Photo by sydney Rae on Unsplash

A toddler walks a dog along a country track. He heads toward the camera. There is a line of trees behind the boy, and grass turns to scrubland on either side. The child wears a striped jacket and green rain boots. The light is autumnal. The dog, large, has a stoic expression. It knows the score. With the red leash tight, the boy veers to the side of the track to walk through a shallow puddle. This done, he looks at the dog, carefully puts the leash on the ground, and returns to walk back and forth through the puddle, at increasing speed, about half a dozen times. Sated, the kid returns to the waiting dog, picks up the leash, and continues his progress toward the camera. The image fades.

The video is called “Best Friends — A Kid, a Dog, and a Puddle.” It has 12,550,490 views and is accompanied by the text “Arthur’s Dad has just written a beautifully illustrated children’s book — please check out http://www.emmyandthewhale.com if you have five minutes!,” proving that 1) everyone’s a writer nowadays, and 2) cash rules everything.

Regardless of Dad’s desire for us to buy his book, the video makes for compulsive viewing. Why? Because adult life is an attempt to recover the joy once felt when splashing in puddles.

Our children have Charles Goodyear to thank for the modern rubber used to manufacture their rain boots. Before he discovered the process of vulcanization, rubber melted in heat and turned hard in the cold — which is fine if you live somewhere with absolutely no fluctuation in moderate temperature, but a problem everywhere else. Sensing there was money in the solution, Goodyear got experimenting. Success came accidentally, when Goodyear was visiting a local general store to show off his latest mixture of sulphur and rubber:

Snickers rose from the cracker-barrel forum, and the usually mild-mannered little inventor got excited, waved his sticky fistful of gum in the air. It flew from his fingers and landed on the sizzling-hot potbellied stove.

When he bent to scrape it off, he found that instead of melting like molasses, it had charred like leather. And around the charred area was a dry, springy brown rim — “gum elastic” still, but so remarkably altered that it was virtually a new substance. He had made weatherproof rubber.

— From the Goodyear corporate website

I first splashed puddles in Wellington, Somerset. Somerset is an English county briefly featured in the 1998 X-Files movie, which was thrilling at the time.

You get a sense of what growing up here was like if a five-second scene in a movie with a 64 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes gets cheers in the local cinema.

There’s a Wellington in Florida, too, home to the world’s largest strawberry patch. There’s one in Washington, the site of the United States’ most deadly avalanche. The Wellington in Ohio was the location of the Oberlin-Wellington rescue of 1858. Here, a group of abolitionists freed escaped slave John Price from the detention of U.S. marshals and arranged his escape to Canada. And, obviously, there’s the Wellington in New Zealand, both the national capital and scene of the first meeting between Jermaine and Clement of The Flight of the Conchords.

But all these Wellingtons are fake Wellingtons. My Wellington is the original Wellington. The ur-Wellington. So how did the small Somerset town spread its name across the world? When the British government wanted to ennoble Arthur Wellesley in thanks for his defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, it looked for the British town with a name closest to Wellesley. The government found Wellington, and Arthur Wellesley became its duke.

Wellington’s independent cinema, still open despite everything, is called the Wellesley. I remember attending Saturday morning kids’ shows there. They’d play Blondie before the feature presentation, as if the owners had given up on music in 1979. The lights falling was a cue for a candy floss riot. Whatever movie was showing — I remember Flight of the Navigator and an Ewok film — sweets would be chucked continuously throughout, and the shouting was often so loud that you couldn’t hear the film’s dialogue. The manager, a tall, gray-haired man who could have been 150 to us kids, would climb onto the narrow stage in front of the screen and demand that the auditorium behaved. Once, a shoe was chucked at him. It flew past his head and struck the screen behind, rippling the material like a stone dropped in water. I remembered this when the Iraqi reporter chucked a shoe at President Bush, a moment described on Wikipedia as the “Bush shoeing incident.”

As you may have guessed, the Duke of Wellington, and by extension my hometown, gave its name to the Wellington boot. The Iron Duke wanted a utilitarian alternative to the Hessian. He gave his London shoemaker specific instructions to fit the boot closer to the leg, remove the trim, and keep the heels cut low. The subsequent style became known as the Wellington, synonymous, at least in Britain, with rain boots. It took Goodyear’s vulcanization process to spread the welly from the aristocracy to the masses. A French entrepreneur bought the patent from Goodyear and manufactured rubber rain boots. They sold in the millions. By 1857, his company was manufacturing 14,000 a day.

Where did all the rubber come from? In the late 19th century, much of it — made to produce tires, inner tubes, and rain boots — originated from the white rubber vines of the Congo. At the time, this slice of Africa was King Leopold II of Belgium’s personal fiefdom. Native populations were forced into collecting rubber for the European overseers. Often whole villages of women and children were kidnapped, to be returned only when agents were satisfied that their rubber quota had been met. Should insufficient rubber be collected, the natives had their hands cut off. The local militias kept these hands as proof of spent munitions, often used in actuality to shoot the local wildlife. Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost describes in detail the colossal ruin caused in the name of commerce. News of the scandal broke only when an Antwerp shipping clerk, Edmund Morel, noticed that for all the goods being shipped from the colony, the only things being imported into Africa were guns and soldiers. Hochschild estimates that 10 million Congolese died as a direct result of the colonial venture.

I can’t imagine Sam Shepard wearing rain boots. He’d be more of a cowboy, his boots made from cowhide leather. Following his recent death, I was aimlessly drifting through obituaries online and found an old interview with him. It was one with purposefully inane questions, the irony signaling how beneath this interviewer interviews are. Shepard plays along, answering “Kate Moss” to both the question about dream dinner-party guests and “what single thing would improve the quality of your life?”

It was Kate Moss who made Hunter the boot to be seen in. A 2014 Daily Telegraph article reported, “Hunter wellies sales soar as it continues to enjoy Kate Moss effect.” She’d been pictured, almost 10 years previously, wearing the boots at the Glastonbury music festival. (Incidentally, Glastonbury takes place in Somerset, making it the only thing to take place in Somerset.)

If you’re interested in this sort of thing, E Online has a whole piece on the history of celeb rain boots at Glastonbury. Kate Moss gets three mentions. Disastrously, in 2010, Emma Watson wore a pair of fakeHunters. How she survived the indignity, I don’t know. Perhaps she appeared in The Bling Ring as penance.

What’s bad for humanity is good for boot manufacturers. During World War I, the British War Office asked Moss’ Hunter Boot Ltd. to produce waterproof footwear suitable for the trenches. More than a million pairs were produced. In Adam Edwards’ A Short History of the Wellington Boot, the author even claims that the boots’ dependability contributed to the Allies’ eventual victory.

But there’s more to rain boots than Kate Moss and trench warfare. There’s also welly wanging. Dictionary.com defines the word “wang” in this way:

wang. n. “penis,” 1933, slang, probably from whangdoodle, an earlier term for “gadget, thing for which the correct name is not known.” Many such words (thingy, dingus, etc.) have been used in slang for “penis,” not because the actual name was unknown, but because it was unmentionable.

Such a definition, however, gives a misleading impression of what welly wanging involves. The verb “to wang,” you see, means to throw something hard. At least in Yorkshire.

This video illustrates the art of the wang and, in particular, what can go wrong if you don’t possess adequate technique. The unfortunate wanger lets go of his Wellington at a suboptimal point. Instead of soaring forward, the boot spins into the air, coming to rest, it appears, upon a gang of innocent bystanders sheltering under golf umbrellas.

The world championships of welly wanging take place yearly at the sport’s birthplace of Upperthong (really), Yorkshire. The official website states:

The premise is blindingly simple — all competitors have to do is wang (Yorkshire for throw) a Wellington boot as far as possible within defined boundary lines, from a standing or running start. It’s pretty much the same as the javelin event in the Olympics with the exception that a welly is unlikely to ever skewer an unexpecting judge or spectator.

The last listed championship took place in 2014. Hopefully, this doesn’t mean there’s been no subsequent wanging. Perhaps Rupert Murdoch has bought the exclusive rights and Upperthong is no longer allowed to publish the results.

After Kate Moss, Paddington Bear is the most famous wearer of wellies. Named after the London station in which he was found, the Peruvian bear with a love of marmalade is the north star of children’s literature. In the late 1970s, when Paddington mania was at its height, toy bears came with special Dunlop Wellington boots. Controversially, these were an invention of the toy manufacturer Gabrielle Designs (run by the parents of Top Gear/Grand Tour presenter Jeremy Clarkson), designed to keep Paddington standing upright. The bear of Michael Bond’s books was barefoot. (Pun intended.) In 1978, 87,000 pairs of tiny boots were manufactured.

Rain boots are a key component of the South African gumboot dance, which originated in the gold mines of early 20th century, the shafts of which often flooded. The owners found it more cost effective to provide the miners with rain boots than to drain the mines.

The workers were forbidden to speak, and as a result created a means of communication, essentially their own unique form of Morse Code. By slapping their gumboots and rattling their ankle chains, the enslaved workers sent messages to each other in the darkness. From this came an entertainment, as the miners evolved their percussive sounds and movements into a unique dance form and used it to entertain each other during their free time.

— From the Project Malawi website

Rain boots may protect a youngster’s feet, but should the child fall into a puddle of mud, they’re not much good. Crystal Palace Park is famous for two things: as the site of the Crystal Palace, a huge structure made of so much glass that it required no interior lighting, and its dinosaurs.

I recently took my sons there. The palace burned down in 1936, and when you’ve seen the dinosaurs once, you’ve seen them plenty, but there’s a great bookshop nearby and the best pizza in London. It had rained overnight — not heavily, but sufficiently enough to mean there was the occasional muddy puddle marking the dirt tracks that weaved through the park. Being a RAD DAD, however, I’d ensured D was wearing his Wellington boots. He could splash until his heart’s content or, at least, until he spotted the ice cream van. My other boy was asleep in his buggy.

I was looking at an iguanodon when the accident happened. Afterward, D claimed not to have seen the mud. I explained that this was a feeble excuse and he was better advised to fess up. Even so, he wouldn’t back down.

What had happened: D tried to jump across a puddle. And he’d done so successfully. However, he landed on the particularly slippery rim of mud and, losing his balance, fell backwards, splashing down fully in the melted chocolate of the muddy puddle, a puddle the exact dimensions of my son’s body. This created a Two-Face effect whereby the entire back of him was covered in mud, whereas his front was spotless.

“I’m not angry,” I said. “Just disappointed.”

I thought to text my wife but knew she’d blame me. I tried wiping him down with his younger brother’s wet wipes. It didn’t make much difference. Passing parents offered piss-take words of consolation.

The worst thing? He was now too dirty for us to have pizza. The brownness of the mud suggested some titanic toilet catastrophe. Its stink wasn’t far off fecal, either.

But that’s the thing about rain boots and kids. The rubber may promise to keep them dry, but in reality, children are always only a slip away from a mud bath. Like adults, I guess. What they need is a rubber suit.

At least the muddy experience may have put D off attending future Glastonbury festivals. The headliner this year, should you have forgotten, was Ed Sheeran.

It never rains but it pours.