Girls Defying Gravity - The Mystery of Heels.

Today I've been pondering about heels. More specifically, stiletto heels. Are they just a sexy, fun yet feminine item of footwear that can be used as an offensive weapon when the moment demands? Or are they really a more sinister, uncomfortable form of women's subjugation designed by men to ensure that we can't do a runner? If so (or not) why are they so flawed in their design? Why do they hurt so much? And why do so many of my regular stiletto donning friends suffer so much sciatica?

The reason for my pondering is that I have at last managed to find a pair that fit fairly comfortably for an hour or so, that I can balance upon and totter around in, defying gravity, without requiring a visit to A&E. But only for an hour or so. Anybody who really knows me knows what a miracle this actually is, having fat feet which are shaped like divers flippers. I even managed to down a few glasses of vino one night and stayed vertical. But that doesn't mean to say they would be my first choice of footwear for the school run. Yet some of the younger yummy mummies manage it. I saw at least five women today wearing them in the school playground.

I was born in the 70s and so misspent my youth in the 90s. Having missed the 80s wave of stilettos, leg warmers and power suits (I was only 10), I went clubbing to the backdrop of the indie and Brit-pop scene. My chosen foot attire at the time was either the Doc Marten boot, Converse baseball boots or a pair of Adidas Gazelles. But to be fair, back then, even the ravers, clubbers and trendies at the time wouldn't have been seen dead trying to throw shapes in the inappropriately sculptured stilt-etto. So twenty-odd years later, this rekindled love affair and “must-have” mentality with stilettos is an absolute mystery to me. Everybody with a pair of boobs or moobs wears them. And the “nearer to heaven” the better!

What I find even more amusing is that so much time is spent talking about them when they're being worn. Literally most of the ladies I caught up with at my school reunion the other week at some point spent time talking about their heels. At the start of the evening it was all “Ooh, love the shoes! Where did you get those from?” and “Ooh yes, I love Next heels, they're just go with EVERYTHING”. By the end of the evening women were groaning in agony and leaning on bars and chairs and tables, bent forward like pensioners crying “Ooh my f***ing feet are killing me” and “I knew I should have brought my flats to change into”. To be fair, I was one of them.

I can only assume that this latest craze is born out of the wine-bar era, our younger ladies having given up clubs and discos for fear of either being violently or sexually assaulted or such venues being seen as uncool and passé. Let's face it, they can't possibly be going dancing in them - if they are, I literally guarantee they are going home with grubby feet, having spent most of the night dancing around them rather than in them! And you can't run from a psycho-rapist thug in heels. It's impossible. I tried to run for a taxi in a lesser cheap pair once and spent the following three days with an ankle propped up and a selection of frozen foods balanced on it. No,  I reckon our young girls must be frequenting restaurants and wine bars these days. At least in the relative sophistication of a softly lit wine bar, they can hover around looking gorgeous, leaning on the bar (or each other) for support with one hand and grasping the stem of an elegant wine glass with the other, scanning the room for psycho-rapists to avoid whilst doing meerkat impressions trying to spot the local eye-candy.

The height of these shoes aside (and Gawd are some of them high!), does anybody actually have feet shaped like a stiletto - a protruding middle toe with the other toes daintily tapering around it to create a perfectly symmetrical triangular shape? Because mine really aren't that shape. I'm wondering if perhaps I ought to get some foot surgery done because that is the only way I'm ever going to be able to join the masses and wear them without looking like a four year old doing her first ballet class.

Heels. A political minefield. Give me a pair of flip-flops any day.

1st September 2012 - Reunions Without Regrets

There can be nothing that hammers home the cruel reality of the merciless march of time like a school reunion. And there can be nothing worse than facing your old classmates and contempories after 21 years without a glass of wine to hide behind. Never one to shy away from a challenge of course, I decided it was time to kick the drink and the junk food the very same week as my High School reunion, opting to drive rather than drown my sorrows in a nice glass of rose vino!

If I'm honest I was searching for excuses not to go right up until I got into the car. The baby is teething and miserable, I'm suffering post-pregnancy weight gain, my hair is breaking off at the roots, and I have a wardrobe of clothes that would make Gok Wan scream in horror. There were so many reasons NOT to go that I was amazed to find myself sitting outside my friend Alison's house, papping the horn ready to whisk her off to the venue. Part of the reason I had got this far was out of guilt that I had badgered another old classmate, Karen, to organise the bloody thing and took no part in helping with the preparations other than sending one or two emails to a few folk who needed to know about it! Despite this, I was absolutely definitely only going for an hour or two. I confidently declared to Alison that I would only show my face and would be leaving by ten at the latest.

I eventually staggered out, tottering on painful heels, at 1am the following morning, having had the most fantastic evening - still sober and safe to drive a couple of friends home. Despite a few awkward moments when old chums smiled and greeted me warmly and I didn't have a bloody clue who they were, It had been a fabulous night if for nothing more than the embarrassing foot-in-mouth, dig-a-hole, crawl-up-your-own-backside moments of my friends.

One example was my friend Clare's bottom-clenching case of mistaken identity, when she walked up to the pretty, red-headed Julie, threw her arms about her and shouted "Hi Sarah! How are you? How's John?" to which Julie politely disentangled herself from Clare's warm embrace and replied "I'm not Sarah." indicating to the only other, rather plump, red-head in the building.

And then there was Emma who patted the tummy of another old classmate, squealing "Oh Debbie, congratulations! When are you due?" to which Debbie replied "No, I'm not pregnant, I'm just fat." Please ground, swallow me up!


The evening flew, the conversation flowed and it was great to see so many old faces. I particularly enjoyed having a laugh with the few lads I recognised, mostly due to the fact there weren't many of them that turned up and of those that did, I didn't recognise half of them! But what upset me the most was seeing the last twenty-odd years etched on the faces of my old classmates. I wrongly presumed that me and the friends I have kept in touch with since school hadn't aged too badly in comparison, but then when I heard a particularly older-looking class peer declare the same to her friend, I realised that it must be that I'm just used to seeing my face and the faces of my friends, and that familiarity doesn't make the passage of time so distinct.

I left the reunion glad I had attended and happy to have caught up with so many lovely people, but I can honestly say that I had no desire to add any phone numbers to my contacts list. I felt more convinced than ever that I have, in fact, kept in touch with the people who mean the most to me and that whilst it was nice to catch up with some of the others, the moments we shared and connections we made, whilst important, have long since gone and are best kept in the past.

Dorothy and the Dwarves: A World of Summer Fun

Today I went to visit an old friend from University to have a catch-up and enable our children to have a long-overdue play date. We arrived just before lunchtime, had a lovely couple of fairly peaceful hours together chatting whilst my friend got on with the usual necessary domestic chores, and after a light lunch she invited me and the children along to a local indoor soft-play area. Apparently, another mutual friend who I hadn't seen for a while was also going. So, after lunch we all tootled off in convoy through the summer storms and drizzle to the ironically titled "Funworld".

Having not been for a while, "Fun" would probably be the last adjective I'd use to describe the place when I eventually got in there today. The place was as humid and damp inside as it was out, owing to the play area being homed in a metal warehouse at the back of an industrial estate. There were hot sweaty little bodies running around like dwarves on ecstasy, squelching and occasionally sticking to the condensation on the equipment. The deafening, excitable screams were difficult to distinguish between those of delight, pain or terror of possible asphyxiation due to lack of oxygen. However, on a microcosmic level, "world" was probably a more accurate word to use, owing to it's over-population and the fact that there wasn't any bottled water to buy. That didn't deter people from queueing for a drink though, clamouring like refugees waiting for an aid truck.

Parched and panting for a drink, any drink, eventually the front of the counter was in sight. What I found on offer instead of water were luminous bottles of those toxic-tasting "fruit juices" that scream "NO ADDED SUGAR" & "NATURAL INGREDIENTS". When I turned the bottle over to see the ingredients there were so many scientific-sounding chemicals added I felt I needed a Latin dictionary and a medical degree to know if it really was fit for human consumption. Either way, it seemed to have the power of a class A drug judging by the amount of bouncing, kicking, running, sliding, jumping, screaming, punching, kicking, crying and sweating I saw today.

In contrast to the tropical temperatures of the building however was the positively icy reception and reluctant assistance of the teenage catering staff, who evidently would prefer to have been at the tanning salon. Their matching orange skin tones were a particularly nice touch by way of a uniform, as was their neatly tied back hair extensions. When being served by them, their sneers and the curl of their lips dripped loathing as they handed over ice creams and drinks. I can't help but assume that Funworld's owners took their "family-friendly" accreditation seriously and that this must be a "family" business - why else would you employ hormonal, miserable teenage girls and their friends? I happened to chance upon a snippet of conversation between two members of staff in which one girl asked the other "What time do you finish?" "In an HOUR!" she almost screamed, verging on hysteria and disbelief, before tutting and shaking her mane as if to transport herself, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, back to the Balearic holiday she was probably on last week.

Luckily for me, my friend had found seats. Not that she got to sit on them much, chasing her youngest about in order to avoid injury from some of the bigger boisterous children. My eldest ran off to explore and play - disappearing for a time then coming to check I was still where he'd left me. I sat making polite conversation with the other mums, in snippets, nodding in hopefully appropriate places because I couldn't hear a damn thing, and waiting on tenterhooks for my sons screams of agony from some mishap or other. Sadly, my child, whilst incredibly lively, has the co-ordination of a crane fly and appears to be the reincarnation of Norman Wisdom. Thankfully, we escaped with little more than a banged arm and another bruise on his shin to add to his collection.

Despite the discomfort of the place, the children had a fantastic time and it was great to have those snippets of adult conversation, in between my friend chasing after her two year old and me struggling with a writhing 18lb 7 month old (who evidently wanted to join in with the other kids despite the fact he can't even crawl forwards yet). We managed two and a half hours before my sweaty four year old, in desperate need of a hair cut to decrease his core body temperature by a few degrees, bounced himself to exhaustion on the trampoline. And despite the amount of children, there were only two accidents which thankfully didn't require any trips to A&E. We all came home happy, tired and in desperate need of a cool bath! ;-)

Three minute non-fiction for my female friends, or "Is it just me but..?"

FRIDAY 27TH JULY

Yesterday I went to see an old school friend who I hadn't seen for months, and apart from a few other occasions previous to that (one including her rather drunken hen-night earlier this year), I hadn't seen her since school. It was the wonder of a particular social network site, and a mutual friend's willingness to cook us lunch at her house one Easter holiday, that brought about this reaffirmation of our friendship. To be fair, our recent reconnection was borne out of our mutual frustration of our domestic servitude. That and the fact our kids are roughly the same age and play quite nicely together.

Whilst at her house yesterday afternoon, after we had eaten lunch, she suggested we went and sat in the garden. A rare treat as the sun was out. As we walked through the dining room to the garden, apologetic and slightly red-cheeked, she drew my attention to a rather large pile of ironing piling up on a table underneath a windowsill. To say it was "rather large" might actually be somewhat of an understatement. In fact, I think I saw injured climbers, helicopters and rescue workers waving at us from the top, but it could have been a trick of the lack of sunlight that that particular corner of the room had seen for the last year or so.

"What the F-?" I screamed in horror.

"I know," she replied "I just don't have the time. The kids are running out of clothes and it would be faster to pop to Primark and buy them a new wardrobe of clothes each than stand and iron those."

I couldn't really disagree. By the look of this particular pile, the onset of the blessed release of death would be more preferable than facing that anytime soon. In fact, were I facing that pitiful depressing stack of clean washing everyday I would feign some madness or other, say, running down the street naked until somebody reported me to social services so that they'd send a carer around to do it.

On closer inspection of the pile of ironing though, it seemed that at least half of it didn't actually need ironing. I pulled out an almost flat pair of denim shorts.

"Well, why are these in here?" I demanded, more apoplectic by the second. "These don't need ironing! And in fact, this top only needs to be put on a coat hanger and hung on the back of the door when you have a shower. The creases will soon drop out of those."

My friend looked aghast at me, as if I was suggesting she dip them down the loo first.

"So many of my friends at work tell me they don't iron. In fact my friend Sue doesn't even own an iron! I just don't know how people get away with it."

"Because there are not enough hours in the day! You have three kids, for Godsake! Why are you putting yourself through this?"

She explained how her mother was constantly nagging her about the state of the house, her cleaning, and the standard of her ironing, generally criticising her about, well, everything involving anything remotely domestic! As she got underway with her story, my jaw gaped open wider and became stiffer with rage. I was horrified.

"Oh my GOD! Ignore her!" I pleaded "I mean, what did she envisage for you when you were a kid? To travel the world? Have exciting experiences? Go out and do all the things she never did? Or stand there behind an ironing board for three days every week?"

"No," replied my friend, "all she wanted for me was to get a job and leave education. When I stayed on to do my A Levels she was furious. 'What do people need education for anyway?' she used to say. 'Those people with qualifications have no common sense'... "

"Well," I said, "you tell her from me that you refuse to perpetuate the cycle of her own female oppression scaling mountains of ironing, suffering hours of boredom and potential suicide for the sake of a few creased Tshirts!"

My friend smiled at my outrage, but deep down I knew there was no way she would go through that clean washing and pull out the less creased items to be hung up in the wardrobe un-ironed. She was far too indoctrinated in the theology of the "Domestic Goddess". Far too devout. And although I doubt that pile will meet with the holy iron this weekend, at some point my friend will be praying at the alter of the ironing board. But only after she's prayed for either; a) a winning lotto ticket so that she can pay for a new wardrobe of clothes from Next, as well as pay for some other mug to do it, b) prayed for either the ironing fairies to visit or an alien invasion, or c) prayed for two broken arms and a sympathetic friend or relative to take pity on her. Either that or her and the kids will be walking the streets of her local area naked, Social Services will be called, and next time I visit her it will be in a secure unit.

And there-in lies the problem for the disillusioned and damned damsel. If our own mothers won't allow us to throw off these domestic shackles, then we've got bugger all chance of the rest of society letting us. Who invented ironing anyway? The prick!