The long and short of it is I’ve given up on wearing high heels - Susan Morrison

Short, y’see, and back then laboured under the mistaken belief that I had to be taller. Sort of a Napoleon thing, although in fact, the ‘Little Corporal’ was probably about five foot sixish.

He had the bad luck to face Wellington. Everyone thought he was very tall, but was actually about five foot nine. He had the good sense to never get off his horse for his portraits or his statues and so he looks taller. Look at that one outside Register House. I rest my case.

I’ve never minded being short. Well, sometimes it's annoying. Bar stools are a particular bete noire.

Those long-legged lovelies who swing elegantly up to sit perkily at the bar fill me with envy. I have to take a short run-up, scramble for my footing then slam into the seat.

I look like one of those wildlife films of baby seabirds scrambling up the cliff face, avoiding the snapping jaws of a predatory sea lion.

Things don’t improve once I get there. Yer lithe young bobby-dazzler draps one slender leg over and hooks her heel into the foot rest.

My feet swing free like a kid on a high chair waiting for her pudding. No free and easy cross legs for me.

Any attempt to get one of my fat thighs over the other immediately leads to cellulite overload. Lumps appear. The cloth straining to contain my chunky legs resembles a perfectly accurate scale map of the Cairngorms. Also, I tend to fall off.

Getting things off shelves can be a nuisance, but domestically I solved that problem by simultaneously breeding a boy child tall enough to get things down from high kitchen shelves while maintaining a total ignorance of matters culinary.

I don’t know how to use the electric spiralizer, so I don’t need it.

It’s become more of a problem in supermarkets since Brexit. All the tall friendly girls from Poland and Lithuania seem to have gone home, and just left behind the equally short Scottish shop assistants.

Mind you, last week a lad scaled dizzying heights at Asda with the skill of a free-style rock-climber to get me the last wholemeal on the shelf.

Aside from catwalk supermodels, no-one ‘needs’ to be taller, although the desire for a few extra inches seems to have seized a chap eyeing up the White House.

Presidential hopeful Ron De Santis is rumoured to be concealing some sort of block devices within those fancy cowboy boots he wears. It's the talk of the steamie in US politics.

You’d think they’d have more to worry about, what with gridlocked legislatures, deranged right-wing politicians constantly defending the nutters' right to carry assault weapons over things like child safety, the planet burning and World War Three barrelling down the tunnel at us, but no.

Americans, it would seem, will not elect a short man into the Oval Office.

But oddly, they will consider a taller bloke facing 91 charges of criminal behaviour.