Somewhere in the undergrowth at the bottom of our garden is buried one red clog.  Size 4. This isn’t some sacrificial ritual perhaps to protect our home from flooding nor a rogue shoe left out for St Nicholas and his naughty sidekick “Black Peter” or a drunken japed lone sneaker swaying on the overhead wire stylee.

No! This clog was thrown. 

Thrown not in a fit of rage, shoeing insult or welly-wanging competion on a blustery May Day. Nor hurled at our local tom cat come a-roving for our feral and slutty tabby, Dotty ….

 No! It was thrown out of purpose and intent and there we agreed it should stay.

Now I know any sane person would be asking, why only the one? You’re not? Well you should be and whilst you’re working that out, I’ll provide a bit of context.

My perfect sized heel is 3”! Oh for these inches, life becomes so much easier. Above all, I can reach the cupboards in the kitchen and see the back of the top shelf in the fridge. It makes me feel organised and in control. You see I’m small. And I only realised I was small when I grew into adulthood. Infact it was only when I had my own children that I started wearing heels. 

When you’re always the smallest (even the smallest out of 5 siblings!) it’s simply a way of being. Comparisons don’t count anymore. Everyone I meet (well most people) are taller than me so (in the words of Forest Gump) that’s all we can really say about that.  I was never bullied as a child. I was bright and happy. No door ever closed because I was small (in my knowledge anyhow). No boy or man  didn’t fancy me because I’m small. Hell , I was “cute” – an all-round “pocket-rocket”.

And along came children.  Children concentrate our genetics don’t they?  They hold a flashlight to our physical attributes. Society is happy to provide the batteries on tap and we’re all ever so keen to identify the familial traits within families. It’s a curious thing this. We happily talk about Zach’s  big brown eyes being just like Daddy’s or Chloe’s curly auburn hair like mummy’s but we wouldn’t comment on the flapping earlobes, buck teeth or particularly large forehead. But we do like to talk about height. As if it has some kind of code or meaning.

I had (I should say have but well you know!?) a friend, who on asking what one of my children’s shoe size was (small is the answer) then proceeded to say that his son had a particularly large size and that it had been proven through recent research that a large shoe size for a 3 year old was linked to high IQ and success in later life! Yes that was a ridiculously long sentence but I had to say it in all one breath for fear of stopping and being overwhelmed by the utter stupidity of it! And breathe.

OMG!  This, my friends, is the level of dumbfuckery regarding size that exists and I had been blissfully unaware of until I was exposed to fuckwit parents. 

There is so much more to say on this subject but  that’s for another blogaway day!

But back to the lost clog …. In the early days of our blended family living together in our farmhouse, I clipped around in my red heeled clogs on our wooden and tiled floor. You could hear me coming. A combination between my hooves and my cuckoo clock fanfared my presence. I’m guessing now that the sound of my clogs was a constant reminder of the new woman in the house. And quite frankly it must have grated. We’ve all worked in places where we train our ears to whose footsteps we can hear coming. The clicketty clanking down a corridor simply draws out the inevitable intrusion of their arrival. A simple knock on the door would suffice without the unnecessary suspense and preamble. 

This wasn’t the reason, however, that the clog got hurled! It was when I trod on my husband’s naked toes (and lovely toes they are), nearly crushing those tiny foot bones with delicate names, that the clogs had to go! 

And in a moment of …. well let’s call it liberation, he took one from my foot and threw it to the bottom of the garden. Why he didn’t take the other remains to be seen but it’s only ever one Victorian child’s shoe you ever find in a bricked up chimney isn’t it?  

Now I am clogless and am thinking about replacing them. I have other shoes with heels and as I’m starting to build this reconstructed life, I’m questioning why those 3 inches matter!?

I was born this way and maybe the external world needs to adapt to me, not me to it.

And so, when we ask of ourselves, what one thing would we change about our appearance, would mine really be to have those 3 inches? How would this truly effect my life for the better? What a waste of a chance to change something just to be able to reach the top shelf of the fridge! Wouldn’t it be cooler, if given the one chance to change, to choose something more fun like having crazy kaleidoscopic coloured eyes or a heart shaped birthmark on our belly. Doesn’t it say something about ourselves that we more often, when asked this question, identify a negative aspect of our physical appearance and say we would like a smaller nose or longer legs …. Wouldn’t it be great if we could switch this around to say I like myself the way I am and to enhance it I would have ….. 

So what’s your 3 inches?