IT'S funny how crises bring out the best and the worst in all of us isn't it?

On the plus side everyone has been quite cheery about the lack of petrol, for once not blaming those who are causing the problem by setting up blockades but laying the blame fairly and squarely on Government.

Most people who have fuel have been offering lifts to those who haven't and there hasn't been much in the way of road rage in the queues at petrol stations.

On the other hand some garages, although not in this area, have been upping prices of the petrol they have. I hope it doesn't spread, and quite honestly if it does, I shall be boycotting any establishment which raises its prices by so much as a penny when things are back to normal.

There is, however, evidence this evening (Tuesday) that panic buying of food is in progress. The shelves in the supermarket were out of bread and I saw one woman buying six one kilo packs of lard and the inevitable bags of sugar and flour. I personally would hate to be her family when it learns its going to be living on scones for the next few weeks.

I have always refused to become part of this rush to the shops to overbuy on basic items, because I'm an optimist at heart. Which is probably why we might be living on marrow risotto, marrow supreme and marrow chilli con carne minus the carne in a week or so.

PS - just got home and discovered who has been buying all the bread - oh the shame of it.

I was looking at a girl stomping across the road outside the office the other day wearing what to my eyes looked like surgical boots but were, I was told when I mentioned it to a somewhat younger colleague ,the very latest in female footwear. Oh dear, here we go again.

When my children were growing up the biggest cause of family rows or rather parents versus children rows were undoubtedly shoes.

This had followed on from the rows my mother and I had over footwear, so I should have been expecting it.

The first fashion row I had with my mother was over a pair of black ballerina style shoes which I wanted with all the passion of a 13 year old. I knew full well my mother would point out that the shoes were unsuitable for school, wouldn't last and were not in keeping with the school uniform rules anyway. She did. I pleaded, promised, lied and finally staged a tantrum outside the shop. All I got for my trouble was a pair of lace up brown leather shoes and the usual crop of blisters for the next few weeks. The choice of shoes in the fifties mainly came under the heading of 'sensible'. In summer you were dragged unwillingly to a shoe shop for the regulation tan sandals.

In the one we went to the owner, who gave no indication that he liked children and every indication that he disliked children's feet, would cram your foot into a metal measuring device and then viciously slam the sliding measure onto your toes. Then he would read out the size (and in my case express surprise out loud about the enormous size of my feet for my age, which made the dislike mutual). Then your mother would add on a size 'for growth', two sizes if you were unlucky.

The same thing happened in winter with lace-ups. The only other footwear you could possibly expect was a pair of plimsolls, Wellington boots for winter and, if you were a dainty little thing with ringlets, a pair of white kid sandals for best. I can't recall ever having a pair of those.

From here a teenager could expect eventually to be allowed a pair of 'court' shoes, usually black or navy, which were just like her mother's as were all her 'grown-up' clothes.

But then, oh joy, stilettos arrived and nothing would ever be the same again. Teenagers uttered a collective sigh of pure delight and mothers upped their disapproval ratings by several dozen notches.

Stilettos were, they said, dangerous, they made holes in the floor, they would give us bunions and corns, they ruined our postures. All true, but who cared. We left a lasting imprint on the sixties, in the true sense of the word, and if you ever look at a house with parquet flooring and it has tiny little dents all over it then you are looking at a true sixties house. Never mind what the estate agent says.

My children used to burst into hysterical laughter when they found my stock of stiletto nostalgia hidden in the cupboard. The main consensus of opinion was that they were 'tarty' which was exactly what my mother used to say. Or rather she used to say they made me look like a streetwalker, which considering I could barely totter 150 yards in them was fairly optimistic.

The worst thing about fashion shoes in the sixties was that they weren't really made for walking. Many of them were made of a kind of cardboard which disintegrated in the rain, so you were left standing on a pair of soles while your nifty little white imitation patent leather numbers keeled over onto the pavement. If you took them back the shoe shops actually said things like 'you've not been out in the rain in them have you.' The heels came off with alarming regularity so you could go out all mini-skirted and thinking you were the bees-knees and return home two hours later limping like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

I should have been more sympathetic when my own children had shoe passions but I wasn't because clogs and wedges were in and children fell off them and schools banned them. We ran the gamut of shoe shop tantrums and hysterical accusations of wanting to make them look like sad old grannies. And then sad old granny shoes were in and I was accused of not allowing them to look like sad old grannies. You can't win.

Personally this sad old grannie finds nothing nicer than being able to slip her aching feet out of whatever pair of unfashionable shoes she has been wearing all day and wiggle the tiredness out of her toes. It's not quite fluffy slipper time yet, but I suspect it's not far off.