When I was six, I made my First Holy Communion and despite the fact that, as a child imbued with a premature cynicism, I was having something of a crisis of faith at the time and felt altogether fraudulent about the whole procedure, I was very interested in the specifics of my outfit.

My dress was quite plain: bought in the children’s boutique in the town I grew up in, it was an unadorned rebuff to the beaded satin atrocities I expected most of my peers would turn up in. I wouldn’t wear a veil or gloves, I decided, and my only concession to pomp and ceremony was to be a pair of slip-on shoes. Slip-on shoes suggested grown-up glamour, a sophisticated world away from everyday laces and buckles. The problem was that when I went to the shoe shop to buy the slip-on shoes I’d seen in the window and knew would be just perfect for the occasion, the slip-on shoes didn’t fit. I had really long, really narrow feet – bony and lanky with toes like fingers; far bigger feet than the average six-year-old – and I just slipped out of the dainty pumps. Perhaps it was karmic punishment for my godless precociousness, for my outfit-obsessed inclinations, but the only shoes in the shop that I could walk in were an altogether ugly-looking pair of T-bar sandals. 

It was the beginning of a painful relationship with my feet and, by extension, my shoes.

"Having big feet impacted on two aspects of life that teenagers hold dear: fashion and sex appeal."

Going to the shoe shop in my hometown became a twice-yearly agony, way worse than going to the dentist (never really got the hatred of dentists myself), far worse even than visits to elderly relatives in too-hot faraway nursing homes. It was humiliating as the man who owned the shoe shop (I still remember his name and his fat belly and his general spitefulness) chuckled at the sheer length of my feet, mirthful at the overdeveloped span, before he suggested a pair of Start-Rites or, worse, a pair of adult Ecco shoes. My cheeks stung with indignation and my throat clogged with the beginnings of sobs as he explained that, due to my oversized feet, the homely navy lace-up shoes – the type you’d expect to see on an elderly nun – were the only suitable pair in the shop. I looked on with rage and envy as other girls my age picked out pretty styles, daintily placing their small plump feet into various designs from the Clarks Magic Steps range. I sometimes stuffed my massive feet into shoes that didn’t fit but generally had to concede defeat after an afternoon of wear induced winces and blisters. I came across a passage about Chinese foot binding in a novel and became obsessed with the notion, spending hours in the local library researching the phenomenon, fretting about its efficacy on a pair of feet already so grossly overgrown, before my mother explained that it was misogynistic torture, and nobody did it nowadays anyway. 

As I got older, my feet got bigger so the problem didn’t go away.  By the time I was 11, they were a big size 40 (UK seven, US nine) or a small size 41 (UK eight, US 10). Buying shoes in my teens was still an ordeal because even though I had at this stage stopped frequenting the shop owned by the fat laughing tormenter, it was difficult to find shoes in my size. Yes, the shoe shops claimed that they went up to a 41 but they seemed to produce a paltry number of styles in the larger sizes. Ask for an eight, and nine times out of ten, the shop assistant would return from the stockroom empty-handed. Embarrassed of this physical flaw, this podiatric idiosyncrasy, I avoided shoe-shopping as much as I could.    

"I devoured profiles of Uma Thurman, Sophie Dahl and Kate Winslet, all of whom talked about the pain of being in possession of a pair of exceptionally large feet."

Shoe designer Olivia Morris, the head of footwear and accessories at Hobbs and a woman I girlishly bonded with after discovering she wears a size 42, recalls a similar experience.

‘By the time I was in my teens I had size 42 feet, that’s a UK nine, so they certainly provided me with a modicum of teenage angst,’ she says. Was she awfully self-conscious too, I ask her, big-foot to big-foot. Well, no, not really, it would seem.

‘It was more about not being able to find fashionable shoes in my size,’ she says pragmatically. ‘It was something I got used to fairly quickly, and to be honest at 5’9” my feet have always felt in proportion to my height.’

Aha, yes, well there’s the rub for me. I am not tall. Morris is a statuesque woman; I, on the other hand, am shrimpy. Back when I was 11 with size seven or eight feet, I was 5’1” or so; now, aged 30 and still in possession of size seven or eight feet (although I swear they’ve shrunk slightly after years of cramming them into shoes that don’t quite fit), I’m a small 5’4”. My feet are an anomaly, a weird freakish defect.

As a teenager, my friends and family teased me mercilessly for my outsized feet; it’s the kind of minor insult you can get away with. It’s not like calling somebody fat or ugly or laughing at their acne; it’s just gentle joshing, isn’t it? I suppose so and yet there was something stinging of it. It wasn’t just that I hated how my feet looked and how out of proportion they were; it was also to do with the fact that they impacted on two aspects of life that teenagers hold dear: fashion and sex appeal.  

"‘I read that both Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Kennedy had very large feet.’ my mother, herself the owner of a pair of sensible size 39s, would offer kindly."

Fashion because well, obviously… When the shop assistants consistently returned empty-handed from the storeroom, my shoe choices were quickly whittled down to what was actually in-store rather than the styles that I wanted to buy and wear. And then of course, there is the problem that some shoes – pointy-toed courts, certain types of flats, anything too bulky – look ridiculous in larger sizes. It’s a point even sanguine Morris concedes. ‘I love the very flat elongated points that Prada and Miu Miu have been doing,’ she says, ‘but  the reality is that there are simply some things that unfortunately just don’t look good on a long foot.’

High heels, I discovered, are the style that look best on a long foot, and so I became a pro at walking in four- or five-inch heels. As other teenagers bought modish, almost faddish, shoes like Kickers one year and Dr Martens the next, I stuck to the shoes I knew suited me: very high, quite ladylike Mary Jane styles. I found succour in fashion generally, as although it was quite obvious the high street cared little for my plight, barely bothering to make shoes in my size, high-end fashion magazines were full of people complaining about their big feet. I devoured profiles of Uma Thurman, Sophie Dahl and Kate Winslet, all of whom told Vogue or Elle or Vanity Fair about the pain of being in possession of a pair of exceptionally large feet. ‘I read that both Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Kennedy had very large feet,’ my mother, herself the owner of a pair of sensible size 39s (it is a mystery how I ended up with such big feet), would offer kindly. 

"At times I am still self-conscious about my feet: I hate filling out forms with my measurements – 5’4” with size eights just seems ridiculous."

But then there was sex appeal and the notion of being attractive, so vital to a teenager. It was obvious that big feet were up there with braces or psoriasis in the I’m-not-a-sexy-teenager-am-I stakes and while a confident, self-assured teenager might have laughed it off with a quip, I was the kind of neurotic girl who spent hours researching Chinese foot-binding in the library alone, the kind of girl who didn’t have brothers or self-effacing shtick. A turning point came when I was 17 and chatting up two American brothers in an Irish country nightclub with a friend. One brother was obviously better-looking, like a young Edward Furlong, and it was clear that both my friend and I wanted to kiss him. I was doing better though, we were getting on well, I was pretty much in there. ‘Lynn has really big feet,’ my friend interrupted, desperate to derail my progress. ‘Like, they’re massive,’ she said, a 17-year-old stew of jealousy and hormones and spite. The Furlong-alike, who was from a small town in New Jersey and was just about to join the army, grabbed them. ‘Woah those are some big feet.’ And then we spent the rest of the night kissing and laughing while my friend got off with the brother who looked nothing like anybody who had ever appeared in Terminator 2 or American History X.

At times I am still self-conscious about my feet: I hate filling out forms with my measurements – 5’4” with size eights just seems ridiculous – and I still dread the moment the shop assistant heads towards the fitting room, anticipating the inevitable disappointment, but the high street has improved, with stores like Hobbs stocking shoes up to a 42, and as Olivia Morris says, ‘We spend so much time as women analysing and criticising ourselves physically but in the end, you can’t change what you are, so it’s probably better to learn to love what you have been given.’

I don't think I'll ever love my feet but I manage a begrudging affection.