Manolos and Farting

You know Manolo Balhniks? Those really pointy jobs worn by people like Liz Hurley and Paris Hilton. They make everyone over a size six shoe look like a pantomime extra from Aladdin.

I tried on a pair once. Yellow size tens. You can just imagine. I looked like I was wearing a pair of giant bananas. One quick turn to look in the mirror and over goes the shop assistant like a nine pin. A very angry nine pin.

I get high score, a free watch and the cuddly toy. But I don't buy the shoes.

Which reminds me. You can get away with anything if you work hard enough at it.

For instance, yesterday I farted in the company of strangers. Worse, it was at a business dinner with clients. Worse still, it was I who was holding forth; I who was the focus of everyone’s attention when it let rip.

I was espousing my opinion on public relations and the private sector complete with table thumping – actually I think that’s what did it – when, mid sentence, the unmentionable happened.

My fart was the auditory equivalent of Hiroshima and, like a dying man, I saw my life flash before my eyes – along with my career.

Seemed to me I had several options. I could laugh and hope my audience would share the joke. I could apologise and seek refuge in their forgiveness. Or I could just ignore the whole bloody thing.

The third option being the only one that didn’t involve my imminent death by embarrassment, I decided, in the split second it took to see the quizzical look on the faces of my colleagues as they turned towards me in search of an explanation, to ignore the whole bloody thing.

So I just kept talking and looked at them all with a straight face, daring them to snigger.

You could’ve heard a pin drop. The tension was palpable. Sweat dripped down my inner thigh. At least I hope it was sweat.

Which reminds me of a time when my daughter was a toddler. One night when I ran her bath, good mum that I am I hop in too, as a special, look-at-us-being-chummy sort of a treat.

But one minute I’m sitting there enjoying a moment of froth-filled intimacy with my daughter, the next something indescribably nasty erupts from her nether regions and I’m sitting in what appears to be beef stew.

If I'm honest, this was only the latest in a long list of maternal faux pas from which my mature years apparently offered no immunity.

Like the time I gave her prunes. Only when daycare called me up at lunchtime complaining they’d changed her five times and the stuff just kept coming out like toothpaste (“Stop squeezing her” I cried!) did it dawn on me that - der - half a packet was probably overdoing it just a little.

Anyway, back at the public relations fart-fest, they’re all just sitting there, watching me, looking for the smallest tell-tale flinch; the briefest tic of the eye that would reveal my guilty secret, at which point they would gather as one and savage me like a pack of hungry wolves.

But I gave them nothing. Not so much as a nervous blink, a guilty smile. Nothing. And they, in turn, behaved as if nothing had happened.

On the way home I cried with laughter when my husband told me he’d heard my fart loud and clear. But because I ignored it so totally, he decided he must have been mistaken – that it was something else, a noise outside, someone’s chair moving.

Anyway, back at Louis Vuitton, I'm making idle chat with Quenelle or whatever her name is, and I find myself developing a bit of a crush for one of the handbags.

It’s a little canvas number, with a solid wooden frame, removable tray, shiny brass fittings and what Roxelle or whatever her name is reliably informs me is Vulcanised Fibre Edging.

The bag is called an 'Alzer' and it costs – wait for it - four thousand two hundred and sixty dollars.

Mind you, to be fair this price includes having little Alzer's details, along with my own, recorded at the company's century-old registry in Paris, in case modom ever needs a new key.

Except modom is by now hotfooting it to her nearest Targé, where she invests in a perfectly decent vinyl leather-look holdall for nineteen ninety five - decimal point after the nineteen, if you don’t mind.

And while the Targé number is sadly lacking in Vulcanised Fibre Edging, it does offer modom a perfectly adequate home for her faux suede purse with balding corners, fifty-percent-off-your-next-meal-at-Maccas voucher book, decaying apple and my highly prized From-Nought-to-Bitch-in-30-seconds key ring. And all without breaking either le bank or le 'usband's 'eart.

By the way, I went back and bought the pointy yellow shoes.

If I can get away with farting in public, trust me, wearing a pair of giant shiny bananas on my feet will be a cinch.

Ends.