I'll bet you didn't know that if you consider yourself a modern and powerful woman you should be wearing boots adorned with Samurai masks or 'crusader-style' metal discs this season?

That purveyor of stylish foot coverings, Manolo Blahnik, was in town this week to launch his new store in Brown Thomas in Dublin. He's the man whose footwear designs became synonymous with Sex and the City and his association with the show made his designs seriously hot property. If you had a pair of Manolos on your feet, you were rich and powerful and just because you weren't living in a loft apartment in Manhattan didn't mean you didn't have bucket loads of New York attitude.

Expecting an exciting insight into why women go crazy for shoes, journalists asked the master of the craft why we are obsessed with pretty things for our feet. "Lately, the extremities are important," said the most famous shoe designer in the world, "and people are almost being forced to look down." Perhaps it makes sense to fashionistas, but being "forced to look down" has yet to convince me to shell out over €500 on a pair of shoes, even if they looked great and could also be worn while cycling.

Even more intriguing were Mr Blahnik's views on extreme high heels. Every shoe shop is full of impossibly towering stilettos and their popularity has been further ignited by the likes of Lily Allen, Victoria Beckham and Gwyenth Paltrow tottering about in five and six inches of pain, but Mr Shoes himself says very high and ornate heels are fit only for Hollywood prostitutes. In a fashion footnote designed to give hope to every woman who eschews towering height for comfort, Manolo Blahnik is more inclined towards the elegance of the Fifties.

Perhaps that was why he was wearing what were described as 'black matador pumps' but which looked suspiciously like the non-slip slippers I picked up in a chain store a few weeks ago for €12.

And another thing

If your political persuasion so demands it, feel free to castigate Mary Harney for not delivering on health, rip her political mantras to shreds and scoff at will at the demise of the PDs, but is it fair to attempt to humiliate the woman by publishing pictures of her in the hairdressers? Taken from outside the salon, a sequence of photos were published in the papers this week of the Health Minister having her hair washed and cut. Why should any person have to put up with such an invasion of basic privacy?