I’ve written before about my feet and how thrilling it was to be getting into heels again, around Christmas time, here.

Going further back, last summer was tricky. My feet swelled in the heat, and went from heel to calf in a solid line. I wrote about it here.

This summer, I’m happy to tell you that things are better. I’ve been wearing dresses, and strappy sandals, and when I take the sandals off at the end of the day there’s no groove where my feet have swollen around them.

Also, I’ve been able to wear heels all day long, for the first time in a loooong time.

I wore these pretty babies

for training, two days running. On reflection, wearing three inch heels in Chatham Historic Dockyard wasn’t my best footwear decision ever. I had to forgo the submarine tour. And I didn’t think in advance about how big a dockyard might be, and how gravelly, and how far apart all of the bits of it might be. (Big enough that you can park several ships, apparently.) But hey ho, you live and learn.

(By the way, I was speaking about Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats at a conference that was using the dockyard as the venue, I wasn’t running a course in swabbing the decks or navigating by the stars or anything like that.)

And wearing beautiful shoes does thrill me. Yes, there can be flat and beautiful shoes, but having been shy of all-day heels since cancer treatment began, it’s lovely to be back in something a bit high. Especially when I have ankles again. I’m unlikely to win any ankle awards – I didn’t notice any men cycling into the water or tumbling from rigging because they were so distracted by the sight of mine – but I’m so glad they’re back.

It’s a little thing, I know, and there is a part of me that thinks I ought not to care. I mean, I’ve been through cancer: I Could Have Died and I am Really Lucky and have a New Perspective On Life and I Understand What’s Important Now and all that.

But, it turns out that, to me, ankles and high heels and feet that look the same at the end of the day as they did at the beginning, is important.

I think that’s OK.

What matters to you?