IN the final week of school holidays, I was out shopping for sensible school shoes for my two children.

I tried to stay focused, but as we trudged around the shops looking for hard-wearing but comfortable shoes for growing feet, I couldn’t help being drawn to the other end of the footwear equation – heels; those beautiful, towering skyscrapers on display in our shoe shops or on the feet of the young and fashionable.

Heels are gorgeous things, elegant pieces of design that elongate a leg, temporarily improve posture and add height and sophistication.
So, if I had had two minutes free without my children always pulling me onwards to view something more important like a state-of the-art “ant farm biosphere”, I probably would have succumbed and bought a pair.

I know deep down that if I spent any serious time in a pair of high heels these days, I would need anti-inflammatories, crutches and significantly boosted medical and life insurance.

Just like my shoe-obsessed mother before me, my feet and ankles are now sadly not what they once were. Decades of wearing heels can have unfortunate consequences.

Tripping and falling as Prime Minister Julia Gillard did the other week is not uncommon, nor are lingering injuries. Numerous sprains and damage from wearing too many high heels in my younger years saw me narrowly avoid an ankle reconstruction recently. Then there are the painful heel spurs and arch problems, though thankfully not bunions yet. The lower back pain, numb thigh and calf cramps I get most likely also have their origins in my less-than-sensible shoe wear history.

It’s important to know ones limitations, and these days I am a sensible, comfortable shoe person – well, mostly.

So despite the pleas from my nearly-six-year-old who says she would die for a pair of little girl heels she spied in a shoe shop, she has Buckley’s. I’m standing firm, determined to set her good example.

Yet, now she’s back at school, maybe I could manage a return to the shoe shops. There is this one pair of totally to-die-for killer heels that if I just wore them now and again to places I don’t actually have to walk much, well, seriously, that really couldn’t hurt, could it?