I discussed trousers last time; my biggest problem in finding something to fit.

Shoes come next.

Again I'm quite lucky. My feet stopped growing at size 12, which is big enough to send some retailers into a spin, but is by no means out of the ordinary. If you have shoe sizes 13, 14, 15 or bigger you have my sympathy.

There was a time when even size 12 feet would elicit horrified shrieks or at least amused smirks from the average shoe shop staffer. Might as well have been looking for clowns feet. I remember a particularly fruitless search in the mid '80s for a pair of smart black shoes; not, you might have thought, an especially unusual ask. I eventually found a pair in the umpteenth shop that were not especially stylish but at least fitted and following the trauma of this event did not shop again for black shoes for at least half a decade.

As with jeans in the trouser department, the light relief in the shoe shop came in the form of trainers. For reasons that escaped me then and pretty much still do, it seemed perfectly normal for a person to want a larger training shoe but not any other foot covering. I lived in trainers for a long time; very comfy they were too, though not especially stylish. Socks were also a problem, until Marks and Spencer started to stock them in larger sizes. I wore a lot of towelling socks with my trainers, since they seemed particularly stretchy.

Again the 1990s started to bring relief for the size 12 shoe wearer, until what I shall describe as the Great European Shoe Size Disaster.

I am not one of those people who get worked up about all things European. I may still think in terms of feet, pounds and pints, but that's more to do with my age than any metric phobia. It's not that I'm all that old, but I was part of the last generation that didn't start out metric and the imperial measures stuck. But I have at worst a fairly neutral view towards the European Union except in this one matter.

It turned out that our imperial shoe sizes were slightly out of step with the European ones. Rather than live with the ambiguity, someone decided that we needed to have Pan-European manufacturing. The shoes were labelled with the European size and the nearest UK equivalent. Perhaps most of you missed this pivotal moment. Maybe your size coincided quite well with its Euro neighbour. Not so for size 12, which was paired up with European size 46. A calamity, since 46 was at absolute best about 11 and a half. 47 on the other hand was an excellent fit for me. But those shops that had decided that 12 was the top of the tree for them would stock to 46 and no further, meaning another barren spell for me.

Whether this elicited an outcry, or whether the shoe retailers gradually sized up, 47 became more widely available over time and now seems fairly well entrenched. But I can't see a 46 shoe to this day without a shudder.