LADIES - where do you stand on high heels?
I confess to viewing the current hoo-haa in the press (aka `stiletto-gate') with detached amusement.
Here's the story. A young lady applies for a post as part-time receptionist with a company whose corporate image for front-of-house female staff stipulates a tailored suit with appropriate two-to-four inch heels. Cue widespread tabloid coverage and predictably vociferous feminist outrage. A storm in a shoebox.
Regular readers know I've a thing about shoes.
My passion dates from the age of four with the arrival of the shoes from America - caramel-coloured slip-ons with daisy-shaped cutouts.
I so adored them I'd sneak out of bed, put them on and sleep in them. Naturally, I rapidly outgrew them and learned to lie when asked, "Are your toes hurting?" - a skill I've perfected over many years.
Otherwise my early shoe life was one long disappointment of Kiltie two-straps, stout school lace-ups and Clarks sandals with squidgy crepe soles.
I recall being almost physically sick with longing for black patent shoes, but they were arbitrarily dismissed as neither suitable nor serviceable. Any wonder that I spent my first student grant on high heels (and handbags) to the sniffing disapproval of my mother. Any wonder that I still suffer the same urgent pangs for possession of beautiful shoes to this day.
To my deep dismay I stopped growing at five feet four and a half and have always been glad of the extra inches heels have added, not to mention the psychological boost of wearing them. In high heels I'm taller, look thinner, feel confident, in charge and could tackle anything.
In flats I'm dumpy, dowdy and wouldn't say boo to a goose. I only wear flats for driving, icy conditions and putting out the bins. `Flats', (the very name falls from the lips with a dull thud,) are so functionally pedestrian. Conversely, the basic stiletto court shoe is a sinuously graceful triumph of design. It sculpts the calf, moulds the ankle, tapers and enhances the most unprepossessing foot.
Don't preach about what damage it does to posture, balance and the bones of the feet. A properly structured and perfectly fitting shoe should be comfortable and every Cinderella must try on many before she finds her own glass slipper.
Sadly, seduced by sudden infatuation alone, many of us ignore these criteria. Like falling for the handsome man who seems right at the time, we bear the consequences. I have several binbags full of glass slippers that fitted in the shop.
Fashion Jeremiahs are currently predicting the demise of the high heel. Not a chance. For centuries they've gone in and out of vogue. The Times fashion editor loftily announces this week that the `shoe du jour' for summer is the `flat white'.
Well, if you want to spalter about looking like Minnie Mouse with your feet in two canal boats, away you go. We're in a crazily unflattering phase at the moment, full of clashing patterns and colours, chiffon frocks worn with boots, evening dresses with trainers, (don't start me about trainers,) or weird `flatforms' resembling two piles of ham sandwiches.
This look's called `Easy Bohemian’. I'd call it "dressed at random by a committee in the dark".
Behind `stiletto-gate' is the whole sexual equality question and a woman's right to dress as she pleases at work - a debate that would fill numberless columns. Suffice it to say, `appropriateness of apparel' is a phrase speedily being consigned to the fashion (and business) dustbin when the CEO of a multinational company appears in jeans, t-shirt and trainers.
Meanwhile, though the rest of me has run to ruin, the legs and feet are still passable. Shoe-a-holics must want to be cured of their addiction. Emphatically, I do not.
There's no redemption for a lifelong sinner expressing neither regret nor a firm purpose of amendment. If I'm condemned to Hell, I'm going there in high heels - and a taxi. Assuredly, I'll be in the most elegantly shod company.