It must be a sign of old age, I'm convinced of it. When you hear yourself saything things like "Kids today don't know how good they've got it" , "I wouldn't dream of being that cheeky with my elders" or "In our day, we had real music", you just KNOW you're joining your parents on the downward decline into warm underwear, stiff joints and browsing through seed catalogues of an evening.

Indeed, such is the case for wearing sensible shoes.

God forbid as a willowy young thing I would ever dream of gracing my dainty size 5's with anything that had a heel less than 3 inches high. My love of towering stilletoes began with early memories of watching my mother getting ready for an evening out, or a social night in, or just for the sheer hell of it. I loved lying on my parents' bed watching her putting on her face and zipping up her dress. But I was overawed when she opened the shoe cupboard (yes, almost an entire cupboard devoted to shoes) and asked me to help her choose the right shoe for the outfit. Amongst the multitude, there were red patent peep toes, elegant cream courts, soft brown leather slingbacks and my all time favourite - impossibley high midnight black suedes with a dozen thin lace straps criss-crossing it like a velvet cobweb. If I was really lucky, and she was in an affable mood, I even got to gently lift these out of their tissue padded box, cram my clammy little hoof into them and stand, clinging to the side of the bed and wobbling precariously for a few minutes, before they were whipped off and whisked away out of sight. I had already experienced my first pair of "high heels" at the precocious age of four. They were a pair of wooden platform-soled clogs with bright orange leather tops each sporting a fluffy rabbit face with jiggling plastic eyes. The platform was barely half an inch high, but it was high enough for me to trip up on the very last stair and get them confiscated for being too dangerous - all on their very first outing. Needless to say, I was devastated at the loss.

Years later, I inherited the spider web sandals from my mother, whose feet had revolted through years of misuse by breaking out in corns and bunions, rendering her incapable of wearing them again. I adored them as much as I ever did, and added them to my growing collection of ankle breakers.

I wore my high heels to work, I wore them on marathon shopping trips. God help me, I even wore them out dancing all night. I couldn't move very fast, I had countless accidents with storm drains, gratings and broken pavement slabs. I even managed to break a heel whilst trying to yank it from the gap at the bottom of a set of london underground escalators. My feet screamed. They bled. They developed agonsing blisters, but I would have worn my shoes to bed if I thought I got away with it. My legs never looked more delicious or long. I loved the effect they had on my calves.

But all good things come to an end. I began falling over. A lot. Once or twice was funny, and I could usually get away with it by pretending to be outrageously drunk (fine excuse if I was out on the town; not very impressive if I was at work), but the beginning of the end started when, running across a road, I tripped and fell - right in front of a moving black cab. On another occasion, I fell in front of the painfully trendy nightspot I was hoping to blag my way into. The doorman wasn't impressed, and neither was the girlfriend I was with, who had her arm linked through mine at the time and whom I had brought down with me. She was at pains to let me know how very, very cross she was with me. Particularly since she broke no less than four (count 'em) of her expensively manicured false designer nails.

So these days my stilletos are confined to the retirement home at the back of my wardrobe, dusty, but not quite forgotten. In a fit of nostalgia, I will dig them out from time to time and try them on, sashaying unsteadily up and down my carpeted dressing room before returning them wistfully to the shoe rack. It never helped, having a size 5 foot (4 1/2 in sandals) on a 5'8 frame. I have the feet, my partner tells me affectionately, of a woman destined to never run away. Yeah, well now they're mostley clad in comfortable trainers or Dr Scholl sandals, I can at least make it to the Deli on the corner of our road in less than 20 minutes.

Forget kids today. Immelda Marcos never had it so good.