Inevitable Shoe-Related Post, or Why I Stopped Wearing Stilettos

I stated firmly to myself a while ago that I wasn’t going to blog about my appearance, lifestyle, health, or relationships, but then I remembered that since I wrote an entire memoir about my life, along with various features in the national press, it would be a bit coy and ridiculous to suddenly clam up now. Plus, these things seem to underpin my daily consciousness to an alarming extent. Is this due to my gender? [discuss] Or my age? [discuss] Anyway, summer makes me think about feet a lot, so shoes it is.

I could have called this post ‘The Politics Of Pain’, to dress it up, so as to appease intellectuals, fetishists, and amateur semioticians, but sod that, it’s Friday. I am who I am.

A visiting Martian might think that SATC2 is a form of school test, or an unpleasant syndrome acquired from living too near a sewage plant. Earthlings know it is a newly released spin-off movie from a very 80s-looking American series that I hardly ever watched, unless by accident. This fact, and the ascendance of Theresa May in our new government, has shoved shoes firmly back onto the agenda. During the cheap credit boom years of the noughties, a high purchase level of footwear on the part of a woman was a prime indicator of social arrival. Once upon a time, Imelda Marcos was seen as a Marie Antoinette, someone to be mocked for her addiction to shoe ownership, but gradually the shopping classes have raised her status to heroine.

I have never been an Imelda. My relationship with shoes is a little more love/hate. Up until a few years ago, my summer shoe ritual involved the following:

1) Buy fashionable summer sandals.
2) After two hours, feet hurt.
3) After four hours, feet blistered.
4) After a whole day, feet bleeding.
5) Alternate with other similar pairs, and continue all summer.

Now, of course, this progression did not come entirely as a surprise, so I always carried about half a packet’s worth of plasters about my person. In pockets, handbags, and the darker parts of my wallet. If you walked anywhere with me, you’d suddenly realise that I hadn’t replied to your last comment, and you’d turn, and there I’d be, bent over, ripping a twisted, bloodstained piece of pink fabric off my foot, and replacing it with another.

After a few weeks of this, my feet were marked all over. Someone said they looked as if they’d been burned. After a hot bath the scars would glow red, like stigmata, and they lasted well into winter.

Similarly, with heels. Once upon a time I used to go to the pub, already pissed, in really high shoes, and stagger home later, with a Walkman (as we called them then) on at full volume. Why I never got mugged is a mystery. And why I didn’t faint from the pain is another.

The trouble with shoes, and other fashiony things, for the last 15 years or so, is that everything went petite. Teeny little pointy feet, kitten heels, little micro tops, tiddly little bits of micro-jewellery consisting of two bugle beads and a seed pearl, all strung on an invisible bit of wire, all kind of ethnic-meets-70s. I missed all the 80s clunky stuff. It was big and you could see it across a room. Shoes were generous. Then they became mean.

After my meltdown in 2002, and I found myself clawing my way back up from rock bottom, I found, in a charity shop, some posh Italian designer flip-flops. They felt like walking on air. Sadly, they came to grief a couple of years later when a cute Jimi Hendrix lookalike, who had clearly been up all night, stumbled into me in the street and trod on one of them, damaging it irrevocably. But I had seen the light. I had discovered the capacity to walk around on a hot day without pain, or blood seepage. From there I advanced to Birkenstocks, which, in my old life, were akin to scabies. I still wore heels though.

And then, in 2006, I gave up smoking. I took a self-portrait on holiday in a bikini a few months before the momentous day, August 31 2006, when I had my last cigarette. I will draw a veil over what followed, but suffice to say I am now twice the person I was then. (NB: not literally twice.)

Cut to last summer. All my high heels, that I’d worn for years and even danced in, were hurting me more and more, but I couldn’t work out why. I have some high black boots, bought in 2005. Last summer, I put them on to go out to two parties. It was going to be a long day. I went downstairs and out into the street, realised I’d forgotten something, and came back up to my flat, by which time my feet were hurting so much that I felt like killing someone. This, after less than five minutes of wearing. I changed them for flats and went out, and stayed out, pain free, for about eight hours.

Then I had my eureka moment. I was about two stone heavier than when I’d bought them! Each foot was carrying an extra 14 pounds – no wonder they hurt. Gotta love physics. And that, as they say, was that. Stilettos, finito. As I’m already 5’10″, I don’t have to worry too much about looking up at people. And there are a few benefits to weight gain, up to a point.

I feel liberated from what, to me, has become a form of painful drag. [discuss] I already felt excluded from the field, to be honest, looking in the windows of Kurt Geiger and the like over the last few years, with their shelves of truly revolting six-inch-heel gladiator sandals, which I call ‘pig-in-lipstick’ shoes, and which always seem to be on sale for a much-reduced twenty quid after a few months. [I’m looking for a decent picture of these horrors, but of course can’t find one this minute.]

This said, and I am only human, if someone asked me very nicely, drove me everywhere, or paid for all the taxis, got me a book deal, and a lottery win, I could be persuaded for an evening…

But, my question is, have I committed a political act?