Who benefits when we have to do everything backwards in heels?

After thirty plus years hobbling myself – intentionally, willingly, expensively, painfully – I DNC / DGAF any more

Sitting next to me in the cafe is a man in a suit. The blue side of navy, ill-fitting. (As if I know what ill-fitting looks like. I suppose what I really mean is he looks uncomfortable.) For the past thirty minutes or so he has been practising his PowerPoint, scrolling backwards and forwards, lips moving in synch. Suddenly, he shuts his laptop decisively, reaches down to pick up his rucksack and takes out a pair of shiny black dress shoes. He then proceeds to unlace the trainers I hadn’t noticed he was wearing and swap them for the grown up shoes, wincing slightly as he squeezes his trainer-spread feet into their confines. Then he puts his trainers and his laptop in his backpack and steps gingerly towards the door.

I am telling you this for two reasons.

Firstly because I have never in my life seen a man do this before. Not once. Have you? (If you’re a man, have you done it? I’d love to know.) And I am knocking on 59, so that’s a long time.

Secondly, because it triggered the hell out of me. I spent thirty years pulling in around the corner outside the venue for an important meeting, kicking off my trusty Converse (as it mainly was back then) and magicking a pair of three – often four – inch heels from my bag, forcing my feet into them, deaf to their anguish, and wobbling into the building. By the time I reached reception I was probably even walking like a person who knew how to.

I became the personification of that old misquote that whatever Fred Astaire did, Ginger Rogers did it backwards and in high heels. For thirty years, I did everything backwards in really stupid, painfully uncomfortable shoes

And I was rarely alone. Alleys and corners all over the city, indeed most cities, certainly in the nineties and noughties, the preferred haunt of women exchanging comfort for the stature they somehow felt necessary for a business meeting. After all, why be comfortable when you can appear tall? Why preserve all your brain cells for making your case when you could be burning through them trying to stand up straight? (Just me?) Or conversely, why hobble yourself when you’re already heading into a situation where nine times out of ten the cards are stacked against you?

For almost thirty years I did exactly that, hobbled myself.