This essay takes the form of footnotes to a non-existent text and limps through a number of questions of feet and legs and shoes and paths and routes, in relation to the work of Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger. Predictably enough it stumbles over Heidegger’s engagement with Van Gogh’s peasant shoes, Meyer Schapiro’s critique of that engagement and Derrida’s polylogue, ‘Restitutions’ on the encounter between Heidegger and Schapiro. In the end it comes down to Heidegger’s errancy and his own failure or stumbling in relation to the other.