High Heels – the Staggering Truth

We went to a do recently. I can’t think of another word to describe it – it was too small for a party, too static for a dance and too boozy for a prayer meeting. The women got talking about shoes. Normally when women get on to the subject of their shoes, I start to count the number of tufts in the carpet. Then one woman said she had 35 pairs. Her tone was confessional, a bit like admitting to owning just two teaspoons. Another woman, with purple highlights, said she had 50. She’d be bringing the stock up to normal soon.

Call me out of touch with the current female zeitgeist, but I’m baffled. 50 pairs? All for the same feet? It’s like having 50 phones. Per hand, it works out the same mathematically. By the time you get to pair 50, pair 1 will be out of fashion. You’ll have to hit that mail order website again, but I suppose that’s the idea.

I blame “Sex and the City”. Some women now think their lives are meaningless unless they can open the wardrobe door and 75 pairs of Jimmy Choos fall out. I’ve seen them staggering out for a pint of milk in a £5.99 Primark tracksuit and a 4” pair of Manolos. I’ve seen them running for a bus and falling over their stilettos. I’m sure they stockpile shoes like nuclear weapons  and creep out at night to gloat at them, glowing in an eerie radioactive light.

“How do you work through 50 pairs -” I asked highlight woman, “on a rota basis?” “Oh no” she replied, “some of them I never take out of the box.”

Quite right. Nothing wrecks a pair of shoes so completely as wearing them.