petite anglaise

A loud, repetitive sound, not unlike rapid machine gun fire, echoes around the almost empty plane, which is basking in the late afternoon sunlight on the tarmac of Leeds Bradford airport.

I hope to goodness that Tadpole won’t choose this precise moment to fill her nappy, as I won’t be able to remedy the situation until the plane is airborne, and the fasten seatbelt signs have been switched off. I am relieved that no-one seems to have noticed this little outburst, however.

Until, that is, Tadpole yells “Mummy! Did a prout!” at the top of her lungs, collapsing into a mirthful little mass of giggles.

Unfortunately, I fear I am the only person on the plane who heard that all important punctuation. Tadpole doesn’t do personal pronouns yet, which can give rise to a certain ambiguity.

Cheeks blazing, I reach for my magazine. Tadpole promptly grabs it, giving me her reading material in exchange. I sigh, and leaf through her brand new colouring book, while Tadpole pores over photos of British C-list celebs in Heat, seemingly fascinated. As she hasn’t had a nap today, and is therefore a volatile little element, I decide against challenging her.

Instead, I unveil my secret weapon. A little unwise, at this early stage in the journey, but needs must.

I pull a pair of gingerbread men out of my bag.

She may be old enough to have her own seat, wear her own seatbelt, and have her own drink and snacks from the air hostesses’ trolley, but she’s not yet old enough to eat a gingerbread man and read a magazine simultaneously.

Mummy: 1, Tadpole 0.

Only one and a half hours to go…

Bonjour!

Ive grown!!!

My trousers and my old jeans are too small and my new jeans slip down a bit.

On Wednesday Grandma washed my hair - I didnt mind at all!

Do you remember the sponge balls that I used to bite? Now I know what they are for! They are fun! Grandma says I can Bend it like Beckham - what does she mean?

I think I’ve convinced Grandma that potties are just for fun. Anyway she says it’s too cold to play in the garden with a bare bottom. She has something she says is a toilet seat but I know its a picture frame as my face just fits in it. She says you can borrow it but I don’t think you’ve got any pictures that size.

Grandad and Auntie R took me to the swing park again. There’s a slide (a “super-toboggan”, just like in Dora), an elephant and a great roundabout. When I got back to the car I couldn’t get in my seat. I said in my best tired voice “Auntie R do it – je suis fatiguée.”

I’ve drawn some really amazing pictures. Tell Daddy I drew Mamie and Papy in their car. And Noddy. With a bell on his hat.

I gave my dolly with the blonde plaits a name – Michael, like Auntie S’s boyfriend - but after a day I decided it didn’t really suit her.

I’d better go. Grandad needs me to help him with his vegetables for the Gardeners Guild show tomorrow and the sun has come out at last!

See you in the morning.

Lots of love,

Tadpole xxxxxx

I should, by rights, be feeling blue.

My Lover is wending his way back to Rennes, as I write, after an idyllic month spent together, pretty much joined at the hip. The sky is the disappointing grey of a favourite t-shirt which has been accidentally washed with something black. As I write, a fine rain begins to fall, covering the window in tiny droplets. The kind colleague who usually provides buttery brioche on Thursday mornings is on holiday; my tummy growls in protest.

I feel good. Regardless. Images from the last three months dance in my head, keeping the demons at bay.

In my mind’s eye, I see myself knocking at a door, leaning my hot, flushed cheek against the smooth wall of the hotel corridor, heart pounding, barely able to draw breath as I wait for him to open it.

I see us kissing in the metro, and remember my wistful feelings when once I wrote about other people doing the same.

I feel the knots in my stomach as my TGV train hurtles towards Rennes for my first visit. Is it really possible for two hours to crawl by so excruciatingly slowly?

The tappety tap of his fingers on the laptop keyboard echo in my head as I drift in and out of sleep, half dreaming, half aware of my surroundings. Opening my eyes, I spy a cup of tea steaming on the bedside table, and smile.

Reaching the end of a chapter, I raise my eyes from my book and give him a surreptitious, sideways glance as I take a sip from my wine. He looks up, sensing my stare. Why is it that the longest, darkest eyelashes are always wasted on men?

Tadpole is shrieking with excitement as he swings her high into the air and onto his shoulders. Daddy is, and will always be, irreplacable, but I am relieved and cautiously optimistic at how well she seems to be getting on with the new man in our lives.

I daydream about our future. I see myself putting down my paintbrush momentarily, in the house we are renovating, so I can grope his bottom through his overalls. Or taking his hand and pressing it firmly to my belly. I test the sound of his surname with my christian name and like what I hear.

So many tantalising possibilities.

Finding a suitable name to describe the man in my life is proving almost as difficult as finding a name I approve of to refer to certain parts of my anatomy.

The word “boyfriend” makes me feel as though I have time travelled back to being sixteen again, with all the enthusiastic ineptitude/dry humping that teen relationships evoke. This couldn’t be further from our reality: he is divorced with two children, I have a daughter, and we are both on the wrong side of thirty. The French equivalent “mon petit ami” is even worse. My little friend? I don’t think so. It sounds like something that lives in one’s trousers. “Mon copain”, on the other hand, is a bit too matey and casual for my liking. It can be used to mean any male friend, not just Mr Right.

I encountered a similar problem with Mr Frog, exacerbated by the fact that we had chosen to have a baby out of wedlock. I often found myself referring to him in conversation as “Tadpole’s dad” (“son papa”), which eerily foreshadowed the events which were to follow, as it carries with it, to my mind, an implication of separation. Her father. Not my anything.

Often, if an acquaintance or a stranger made the assumption that Mr Frog was actually “mon mari”, I chose to go with the flow and let them go on thinking we were married. It just seemed easier that way. Although I do recall a heated exchange with my mother once on that subject. She was lamenting the fact that she didn’t know how to refer to Mr Frog when talking to her friends. Exasperated, I retorted that I was hardly about to get hitched just to make her life easier by putting her out of her semantic misery.

“Partner”, which I find somehow cold and clinical in English, aside from any same sex relationship undertones, doesn’t really have a French equivalent. Living together, or co-habiting, is known as “concubinage” in French, a choice of vocabulary which I personally feel uncomfortable with, conjuring up as it does images of courtesans, kept women and secondary wives.

Feeling thoroughly let down by both French and English, I tended to refer to Mr Frog quite simply by his Christian name, relying on context to fill in any blanks people might have.

I intend to do the same with my new man, at least until we get around to tying the knot. But this doesn’t seem fitting on the internet, so you’ll just have to make do with “my Lover” for now. With a capital “L”.

Now that particular thorny subject has been put to bed, all that remains is to resolve the anatomical question.

Answers in my box, please.

We take our seats on the soon-to-be-Paris-bound Jet2 plane, patiently parked on the tarmac of Leeds Bradford airport.

I am feeling a strange little pang. It is the first time I have left Tadpole in the mother country. She will be holidaying with mum and dad for the last week of the childminder’s vacation, and I will retrieve her next weekend. The Lover and I took the opportunity to conduct a a grand “meet the parents” tour of Yorkshire.

The pilot makes an announcement. “We are currently delayed, as two passengers have checked luggage onto this flight but have failed to put in an appearance at the boarding gate. We apologise for this delay, and will be setting off just as soon as their baggage has been removed from the hold.”

I sigh, mutter something grumpy but inaudible and glance at my watch. The only good thing about arriving in Paris a little later than expected is that I will probably not be subjected to the Grand Prix on TF1.

I reach for the Sudoku book, pen and pencil. I’m sad to say that, as with most things (blogging included), I have come to it unfashionably late. I completed my first puzzle in the Yorkshire Evening Press at 1 o’clock on Friday morning. By Saturday afternoon I was addicted and have already had several vivid dreams involving rows of numbers. Particularly 9’s, for some reason.

Time passes, without me noticing, so absorbed am I muttering “it can’t be a 4, a 7 or a 9,” or something similarly fascinating, under my breath, and then the pilot takes to the PA system once more.

“We have a new development, Ladies and Gentlemen,” he says, clearly enjoying himself. “The two missing passengers have been located and rather than remove their baggage, we will be allowing them to join us on board.”

I roll my eyes at my Lover, and we agree that we would not like to be in their shoes when they finally board the plane and feel the weight of a hundred or more Paddington stares. The pilot, however, has not yet finished his speech:

“I think you should all give them a hearty round of applause to show how much you appreciate them finally deciding to join us!”

Grinning at this somewhat unexpected suggestion, I put down my puzzle and watch the doors. Will it be another dim-looking perma-tanned couple, he with a rather too tight T-shirt, her with a Burberry handbag? Or perhaps a couple of old dears who are a little hard of hearing?

Instead I see a reasonably attractive (if you like the boy band look, which I don’t) young man and his very slinky black girlfriend. She looks flushed, and slightly dishevelled. He looks exceedingly pleased with himself.

The Lover and I give each other a conspiratorial look. “They were so shagging in the toilets,” I exclaim. Probably too loudly.

At first, no-one claps. But after a few seconds of silence, someone does start to applaud, a few rows behind us, and is joined by other, hesitant pairs of hands.

The young man shoots his companion a glance, then breaks into a wide grin and takes a theatrical bow, to rapturous applause.

I join in, unsure as to why I am enthusiastically congratulating a complete stranger on his sexual prowess (well, they must have been out of earshot of the tannoys for a good half hour) and ability to seduce such a fine looking lady. After all, these people have made me late.

Late for the Grand Prix.

I clap with renewed enthusiasm.

---

I have come to the conclusion that music festivals and migraine headaches do not good bedfellows make.

Tadpole safely deposited with Mr Frog for the long French bank holiday weekend, the time had finally come to accompany my Lover to the Route du Rock music festival, held in an eighteenth century fort near St Malo. I hadn’t been to a fesival since Glastonbury in 1995, and was no longer sure I had the required stamina, but it did sound very tame indeed by Glastonbury standards, and the Lover can be very persuasive when he wants to be.

We arrived early Saturday evening, and pitched our brand new Decathlon tent. Time to pitch tent: 2 seconds. My scepticism when examining the instructions was unfounded: all you have to do is throw it into the air and watch it spring into shape, as if by magic.

I thought back to my Glastonbury experiences, where, by a combination of bad planning, inebriation and stupidity we often ended up trying to put up devilishly complicated tents in pitch black fields, with only a cigarette lighter or a box of matches to guide us. I have a less than fond memory of waking up and realising that I had pitched my tent on/slept on the deep imprint left by the treads of a tractor tyre. But pitching a tent in the dark and swearing/giggling a lot is what festivals are all about, so Decathlon are making it just a little bit too easy with their magic tents, in my opinion.

Headliners at this year’s Route du Rock: The Cure. It was their only date in France this year, and if you have spent any time in France at all, you will realise that The Cure have always had an ENORMOUS following in this country. So this was quite a big deal. In fact, for the first time in the festival’s history, Saturday night was sold out. All 12,000 tickets.

I was rather excited myself. I must confess that I did go through a Cure phase of my own, in my late teens and early twenties, and a black and white Boys Don’t Cry poster adorned the wall of my university bedroom (later to be replaced by Kurt Cobain). More recently, whenever I have indulged the ipod and let it have a little shuffle, it has shown an alarming prediliction for Cure tracks, so albums like Faith and Disintegration have undergone something of a revival in my household. I’d never seen Bob and Co in concert, however, hence my eager anticipation.

There were Cure fans everywhere. It was a fantastic people watching opportunity. Hours of backcombing. Litres of hairspray. Metres and metres of black satin and lace pulled tightly over bulging thighs and middles. Brides of Dracula. Rather rotund Robert Smith clones. Official and unofficial band T-shirts in every direction. Clearly the unwritten, tacit rule that one does not wear a band T-shirt at the band in question’s own gig is not one the French are aware of.

The other bands played, and struggled to make much of an impression on me, however enjoyable the general festival vibe. I rarely get into a band at a festival, unless I am already familiar with their music. Otherwise, it tends to wash over me a little.

And then The Cure arrived, and launched into… an album track. A long, swirling hymn to doomed relationships and depression. Followed by another, in a similar vein. Or an obscure b-side. These gave way, occasionally, to catchier, crowd-pleasing tracks. But it was a self-indulgent set, which seemed to be aimed more at the brides of Dracula than the festival going public at large.

After about an hour, I realised that a flashing red bicycle light, which some considerate person was wearing on his head, was bothering me. In fact, now that it was dark at the festival site, all the stage lights were vivid and glaring, and I was actually having trouble focusing my eyes. People moving through the crowd suddenly loomed in front of me, appearing out of nowhere. I was confused, disoriented, and wondered, idly, if one of my drinks might have been spiked with something chemical.

I struggled on, valiantly, for a while, but the visual disturbances were getting worse, not better, and the Lover and I retreated back from the standing room to a place where we could sit down. “It feels a bit like the aura I get before a migraine attack,” I mumbled, brain addled by too many lagers to realise that it wasn’t “a bit like” a migraine; it was a migraine.

When the feelings did not subside, we decided that heading back to the tent would be the best course of action. The headache struck just as we were zipping our sleeping bags together by the backlight of a mobile phone. Indescribable pain, which made me claw and clutch at the right hand side of my head in futile desperation, rocking forwards to wedge my head between my knees to stave off waves of pain-induced nausea.

Through a veil of throbbing, pulsing pain I heard my favourite tracks. A Forest. 10.15 Saturday Night. Boys don’t Cry.

I realised I was crying.

Two weeks with the French ex-in-laws sufficed. Tadpole has gone all French on me again. French and a little more square eyed than I would like.

“On va regarder Dora [the explorer], oui, d’accord?” she says earnestly, nodding her milky little chin for extra emphasis and widening her eyes. My daughter, the hypnotist.

“Mmmm I’m not sure. Why don’t you draw mummy some pictures of Noddy instead?” I reply, endeavouring to be a good mother who doesn’t allow herself to resort to CBeebies and the other delights on offer on Lover’s Sky TV until the going gets really tough.

“Si! On va regarder Dora, quand même!” Tadpole counters, seemingly very sure of herself. Her intonation is not indicative of a question. I wonder how used to getting her own way she has grown of late.

I capitulate, eventually, and enjoy Tadpole’s look of utter disbelief when Dora opens her cartoon mouth and (American) English words trip off her tongue, along with a smattering of Spanish phrases. Because the Dora whom Tadpole has grown to love speaks French, with a few token English words thrown in.

All manner of phrases with which she wow us with this week appear to have Dora-related explanations. “Tico l’ecureuil” turns out to be a character from the same. It is somewhat galling to see that my daughter can already pronounce the notoriously difficult French word for squirrel far better than I can.

At mealtimes, Tadpole repeats a previously unheard phrase over and over again. “It’s delicious!”, she exclaims. Even when it isn’t. Mr Frog confirms my suspicions, rather bashfully: this is indeed yet another Dora phrase. He then goes on to list all the activities Tadpole took part in over the past fortnight, in a feeble attempt to convince me that she didn’t just watch videos all day long.

I notice that whereas the French Dora has a pet monkey called “Babouche”, in the American version, the very same monkey is called “Boots”. How very confusing.

However, in true toddler style, Tadpole decides only to hear what she wants to hear, successfully filtering everything else out. Rather like when I mention key words like “bedtime” and “nappy”, which are generally greeted with temporary deafness and a vacant stare.

So, when I try, helpfully, to explain why the monkey has two names, she looks at me scornfully, flatly refusing to believe a single word, despite the fact that she has just watched an entire episode.

“Non. Il s’appelle Babouche, le monkey, mummy, pas Boots. Quand même!”

That’s me told.

Odd things have been afoot in my kitchen.

Over the past two weeks, while my Lover was in town, I changed beyond all recognition. First, I started cooking proper meals (on the nights when Lover didn’t cook for me, I hasten to add, although I never managed to persuade him to cook only wearing an apron, despite much pleading), as opposed to scoffing Tadpole’s spurned fish fingers and sweetcorn, followed by a few crisps or other unhealthy snacks, and washed down with a glass of wine in front of the computer, which is what my diet habitually consists of.

Mr Frog and I didn’t tend to eat together, so I had abandoned my non-wifely kitchen duties long, long ago. Largely because I ate hours earlier, unable to stave off the hunger pangs until he arrived home from work around 10 pm.

But, not only did I cook proper dinners for the past fortnight, but I also found myself baking. Custart tart. Scones. A rather tasty quiche. Carrot cake with cream cheese topping. All very English. In keeping with the extraordinary volume of tea which I was drinking.

Now, I’ve always been a firm believer in the old adage that the surest route to a man’s heart is through his trousers, and emphatically not via his stomach, so I simply don’t know where all of this domestic goddesshood has welled up from.

The bakefest will have to cease, as my waistline is already suffering, but before I turn the page on this worrying episode, I just wanted to share the fruits of my labour with the internet.

I made shortbread biscuits, in honour of Tadpole’s return. We decorated them together.

Do be careful not to drool on your keyboards.

I take a seat in the métro, and adjust my ear buds. I rather like the journey to work in August. Most Parisians have sloped off to the beach for a few weeks, so the carriages are empty but for a handful of tourists. And I do enjoy tourist-watching. I wonder, idly, what it is about being on holiday that saps people of whatever dress-sense they may once have possessed.

I smooth down my gauzy skirt. I love the way it moves when I walk, but as it is so floaty as to be barely there, I can never quite shake off a feeling of paranoia when I wear it. If you are a girl (or a transvestite for that matter), you will be aware of the perils of the skirt/shoulder bag combination. A perfectly demure knee length skirt can and will end up skimming the top of your thighs on one side when you have walked not 200 metres, as a thoughtful passer by (female) pointed out to me the other day.

A doddery old man gets on at Gare de l’Est. He looks about eighty years old, has a small, wiry build and wears fairly non-descript clothing, except for a sleeveless beige jacket with lots of pockets, which I have decided to call a safari jacket, for the purposes of this post.

Ignoring the swathes of empty seats all around me, he sits down in the seat next to mine. Except he doesn’t. He sits down half on his seat, and half on mine. On my floaty skirt, with the whole of the left side of his body touching mine. I was already leaning against the window out of choice, but now I am pinned to the wall, whether I like it or not, unable to move.

I wonder what to do.

First, I cast about for a sympathetic person to roll my eyes at. The lady opposite avoids eye contact and pretends not to notice my predicament.

Maybe, I say to myself charitably, he just sat down clumsily, and this unnecessary proximity is purely accidental. Any minute now, the man will move further onto his own seat, muttering an embarrassed apology.

The metro pulls out of the station. The man doesn’t move. Instead, he appears to lean in closer.

Maybe, I say to myself with increasing desperation, he hasn’t noticed that he is sitting almost in my lap. After all, he is staring into space with a very vacant expression and could well be senile. In which case, this is all perfectly innocent, and nothing I say will make a blind bit of difference anyway.

The man buries his elbow further into my right hip.

Two more métro stops go by as I dither, rehearsing suitable lines in my head.

Sarcastically: “Would you like to sit in my lap?” (Too dangerous. He might well take me up on the offer.)
Politely: “Would you mind sitting on your own seat?”

I opt for a different approach, which involves standing up abruptly at the next stop, pulling my skirt from under his leg sharply, and shooting a disdainful glare over my shoulder as I flounce over to sit on a nearby strapontin.

I breathe a sigh of my relief, but am still not really 100% convinced that Mr Safari Jacket was intentionally doing anything lecherous. I may well have been overreacting.

When I arrive at my destination, I realise that Mr SJ has vanished.

Odd. I don’t remember seeing him get off.

As the metro pulls away, I spy a girl through the window. She is sitting at the far end of the carriage against the wall and is cringing away from a little old man wearing a beige safari jacket.

I feel vindicated, but also rather depressed at having my suspicions confirmed. Clearly it is a waste of time giving anyone the benefit of the doubt these days.

There is a Tadpole shaped hole in my life at the moment.

She has now been staying with her French grandparents for ten whole days and I’m starting to ache a little. I miss waking her up in the morning, watching her stretch and pout and roll over to face the wall, murmuring, in protest, “[Tadpole] elle fait dodo!” I miss burying my face in her neck and inhaling her soft, warm scent. I miss brushing her tight, golden curls. I even miss holding her down with my knee as she squirms and objects to having her nappy changed.

Last week I had to bite the bullet and call the ex-in-laws, so that I could hear Tadpole’s voice for a few precious moments.

It was my first contact with belle mère since I took on my new role of homewrecker and adulteress, so I felt a little awkward and had to prepare myself psychologically for the ordeal by doing lots of pacing around the apartment prior to the appointed hour.

Tadpole answered the phone. Except she didn’t sound like Tadpole. She sounds like a little French stranger, somewhere far, far away.

“Allô! [Tadpole] elle a un bobo!” she announced proudly.

I wasn’t sure she even knew it was me she was talking to.

Mother-In-Law hastily grabbed the phone, anxious to explain that the bobo in question was just a minor scrape on her knee, and that I was not to be alarmed. As an afterthought, she said hello, and asked how I was.

“Very well thank you,” I replied, gaily, and then cursed myself for not dampening down the happiness in my voice. I have no idea if she knows about my Lover, or indeed that he is keeping me company in Paris while Tadpole is away, but it seemed indecent somehow to sound too happy, when her own son clearly isn’t right now. Which is, of course, my fault.

“Right. Well. I’ll put [Tadpole] back on…” she said, her voice taut with embarrassment. Or indignation. I couldn’t tell. Telephones are not good for conveying mood accurately, I find.

I resumed my conversation with Tadpole.

“So, what have you been doing darling?” I enquired.

The garbled reply included the word “piscine” so I presumed the paddling pool was involved. The only other words I could decipher were “les cloches”.

Tadpole has an inexplicable obsession with bells. Whenever we stay within earshot of a church and hear bells ringing, Tadpole invariably gets very excited and shouts: “T’entends les cloches? Ecoute! ” while running to the nearest window and attempting to see where the noise is actually coming from.

It’s endearing the first time you hear it. Less so when the bells in question chime four times every hour.

“Can you sing mummy a song?” I venture, desperate to hear more of her distant little French voice.

I am treated to a very accurate rendition of “une souris verte”, in which a green mouse, when caught by the tail and dipped in oil and water, miraculously turns into a hot snail.

Tadpole loses interest in the telephone after that and MIL and I say our rather tepid goodbyes.

I miss Tadpole even more after that.

I have been tagged with a shoe meme. Not only tagged, but challenged: “Petite, because she’ll never do it.”

Grrr. Of course this means I have to. But if it makes less than thrilling reading, it’s beyond my control.

Until about the age of sixteen, I loathed buying shoes. I liked having my feet measured at Clarks shoe shop, in the special machine with metal bars that gently closed around my feet, the vibrations of the machine tickling slightly, but I didn’t like the sensible shoes that we invariably left the shop with. Not only did the shoes have to comply with strict school uniform regulations, but they also had to have a low heel, because it had been decreed that I had weak ankles. Thus for many years my shoes were of the lace up, sturdy, characterless variety and the prospect of buying a new pair was not something I tended to get terribly excited about.

At sixth form college there was no uniform. Finally I was free to express my personality via my footwear. And what did I buy? Black slip-on plimsolls to start with, just like the regulation ones we used to wear in PE classes at school. I think I favoured these because they cost very little. Then, in keeping with my status as an NME and Melody Maker reader, I graduated to my very first pair of Doc Martens. These were worn with everything: the charity shop Laura Ashley pinafores which I favoured at the time, jeans, mini skirts and even ball gowns. At university, I graduated to a pair of bright blue Docs, and strung beads on the laces. I loved those boots, and wore them until the shiny leather cracked.

A couple of years later, I discovered electronic music and everything that entailed, which generated a need for footwear which would enable me to dance for twelve hours at a time. The Doc Martens were swiftly retired, to be replaced by suede trainers, worn with shimmering sequined mini-dresses. (I never could understand how clubbers managed to dance in strappy sandals.) These, when not adorning my feet, lived outside my window. For obvious reasons.

It was only when I began working in offices (circa 1998) and earning a wage, that I started to take any interest in shoes, owning multiple pairs, and investing in different styles of shoe to complement different outfits. Throwing caution to the wind, and blocking out my mother’s voice in my head, protesting in vain about my weak ankles, I bought shoes and boots with heels. A revelation! I discovered what most short people had probably known innately all along: they made me look taller, and made my calves look thinner. It was an epiphany, of sorts.

I still don’t think I own very many pairs of shoes by Nardac, schuey or Coquette’s standards. And I’m sad to say that I am not au fait with much in the way of shoe terminology, so you won’t find me bandying about phrases like ‘Mary Janes’ with careless abandon.

My main gripe when buying footwear in France is that I can never find a pair of boots which I can actually zip up over my fair (but slightly sturdy) calves. I’ve learned my lesson: I source those in Blighty, to avoid embarassment.

 

Below is the shoe meme, in case this sort of thing really does fascinate you:

How many pairs of shoes do you have?

• 1 pair of multicoloured suede pumps from fun&basics in Madrid
• 1 pair of black kitten heel shoes for work, can’t remember where I bought them
• 1 pair of patent leather high block heeled shoes from Nine West which caused me to fall down the stairs at work, with the sound of my mother’s voice saying “I told you so”, echoing in my ears…
• 1 pair of black knee high boots (from England, for aforementioned reasons)
• 1 pair of brown high heeled ankle-high boots
• 1 pair of black medium heeled mid-calf high boots (from England)
• 1 pair of brown tiger ‘Kill Bill’ trainers
• 1 pair of black coq sportif trainers
• 1 pair of brown flipflops
• 1 pair of black and beige flat sandals from Office, UK**
• 1 pair of black strappy sandals with kitten heels
• 1 pair of gorgeous brown Louis Vuitton shoes from a private sale* (I photographed these, then deleted the picture by accident, sorry)
• 1 pair of slightly less gorgeous Louis Vuitton shoes from same
• 2 pairs of Barry Comfort slippers (free when Mr Frog did their advertising involving very sarcastic talking slippers)
• 1 pair of complimentary slippers from a hotel in Geneva, 4 sizes too big, courtesy of Mr Frog

Total:16 (which probably doesn’t qualify me for “proper girl” status, and I’m really scraping the barrel by including my slippers)

Most expensive pair of shoes: *

Last shoe you bought:**

How many shoes under your work desk:

Er, I’m not sure I understand this one. That’ll be the suede pumps I’m currently wearing. I don’t make a habit of bringing extra pairs into the office. Should I?

I wouldn’t mind if my Lover’s shoes were also under the desk, provided they were attached to Lover. But that’s too rude a fantasy for my mum to read about.

At this juncture I think I am supposed to tag someone else with the shoe meme. But I think I’ll just look for volunteers instead. First five people who want to brag about their shoe collection, mention it in the comments box below and I’ll link to you here.