I was eating with good friends.
We'd seen to the hostess' coq au vin and had our eyes on her rhubarb tart, when a professional lady let slip she'd performed an act of high-heeled hooliganism. Madam X had demolished a Queenstown airport barrier - the boom they use to protect their car park from the moneyless. This deed was done in daylight.
She didn't smash the barrier in the name of the poor, nor was she training for a crew job with Greenpeace. The gate was munted because Madam X drives in her heels.
''I wound down my window at the boom gate, and reached for the button thingy which spits out the ticket, and raises the arm,'' she explained.
''But I'd stopped too far from it. Everyone does. I tried to stretch further out the window, my shoe slipped off the brake, and that's how my high heel got jammed against the accelerator.
''The car leapt forward and smashed through the barrier. Next in my sights was a woman pushing her baggage trolley. Just when I thought I'd send her to the Promised Land, I got my heel free.''
We made tut-tutting noises into our rhubarb, the males thinking dark thoughts about the frivolity of women drivers.
''My next problem was I was running late for my flight, so there wasn't time to own up and turn myself in.''
Well this is understandable. There are so many desks at an airport it's unclear which we front to say: ''Please sir, I just buggered your barrier arm.''
She boarded her jet figuring it would be dealt with by the time she returned. The incident was on the car park security cameras, and her vehicle sat guiltily near the wreckage, its windscreen smashed. There was no way out. When she flew back in, she found the barrier arm restored, the punters still being fleeced, and her injured car in the place she'd left it. It sat unmolested by officialdom, with neither wheel clamps, nor an envelope containing a summons. Perhaps we underrate the helpfulness of help desks. When our boom buster approached the likeliest and began to explain her misdemeanour, it was immediately presumed she'd lost her car park ticket and needed another. She was offered a complimentary one. Home free.
The saner side of me recognised this lady is a heroine who should be presented the keys to the city and the Queen's Service Medal.
Nonetheless, my other brain was about to launch into a lofty lecture on the silliness of driving in high heels - our sexism is hotwired at birth - when I remembered the case involving myself, the motorbike, and the brothel creepers.
All but the youngest will recall that a ''brothel creeper'' is a brown suede desert boot with ripple soles the height of tractor treads. These were briefly fashionable, although not solely as brothel-wear. In those times, men who wore any shoe that was not standard black were suspected of communism and listening to Elvis Presley. Our fashions were mocked by the staid.
Mr Cool started his motorbike, and was about to roar off, when his left brothel creeper slid off the footbar. (These were not safe bike boots.) The brothel creeper pawed at the ground for balance, and I slipped backwards, my fingers grabbing the hand throttle for support, the bike thus leaping forward. The more I slipped, the more I pulled on the throttle, and the more I accelerated.
The problem was not so much that I panicked, but that I eventually wrestled myself back on board the runaway. By this moment my bike was airborne, and sailing over a bank. Fortunately, it never fell to earth. It wedged itself in the crown of some sort of tree, perhaps a magnolia, conceivably a Norfolk pine, or maybe a jacaranda. I'm not good on vegetation. But this matters not. Any man who has sat astride a hydrangea cursing his brothel creepers is not well placed to criticise the lady who drives in high heels and, to boot, performs a public service.
Of course, there are worse humiliations to be had. Only last month, the Daily Mirror reported a London fire brigade was called out to rescue an elderly man who'd got his penis caught in a toaster. Doubtless he'd tripped over his jandals. Let he who is without sin cast the first shoe.
- John Lapsley is an Arrowtown writer.
