Lethal, those Crocs. And I’m not just talking about the admonitory tales of slippage posted on the “Tell Us Your Crocs Story” page of the Crocs Shoes Fans Forum. (Sample: “Almost broke my wrist after a rainfall today. Scary fall. Just happened so damn fast.”) Now the shoes have been allegedly “implicated” in the malfunction of equipment in a Swedish hospital, where a build-up of static electricity in the Crocs of medical staff supposedly took down a patient’s respirator. NHS trusts are considering a ban; and the general consumer may also reflect soberly on this new threat, which raises the terrifying prospect of an innocent Crocs-wearer going to the dishwasher and causing a power outage within a 15-mile radius.

Factor in the additional promise of constant badgering by the style police, who are united in declaring the Croc “the ugliest shoe ever”, and, clearly, being a Croc-owner has never looked more daunting than it does today.

At least one can see a way out of the static electricity quandary. You are probably familiar with Jibbitz – plastic ornaments for the holes in the tops of your Crocs, at 99p a time. Would it not be simple enough to devise a Jibbit that doubled as an earthing device? If it were available in the shape of Gordon Brown’s head, that would be even better. And thus, in a hospital or other sensitive environment, a person’s Crocs would openly declare, by their Jibbit, that they had been rendered safe and unlikely to kill you ordinarily.

Meanwhile, this latest health scare will be playing well among the anti-Croc brigades, who fulminate at the Croc’s cultural saturation. A while ago, if anyone had said “Soon nearly everyone you know will be wandering around in brightly coloured rubber clogs”, I would have laughed in their face. But that’s why I’m not a multimillionaire kitchen-table entrepreneur and three people in Boulder, Colorado, are.

The forces bent on throttling the Croc, though, grow increasingly militant. At the I Hate Crocs website (“dedicated to the elimination of Crocs and those who think that their excuses for wearing them are viable”), a range of T-shirts are available, showing a Croc under malicious attack from scissors. The website will also direct you to its video of a ritual Croc-burning. (They are slow to catch, it turns out, though the insertion of a Roman candle appears to help.)

Such intemperance, though – it can’t be entirely healthy, can it? For the record, I write as one of the diminishing minority who don’t own Crocs, yet who feel neutral about other people owning them. I suppose, on the whole, I would rather people didn’t come to my funeral in the green ones. And, for now, pending further investigation, I would probably prefer you to slip out of yours before approaching my respirator. But the anger, the resentment and, now, the anxiety generated by some rubber clogs – are these not hard to share? Mostly, surely, we just wish we’d thought of them.

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