A Wild Young Under-Whimsy

How to fall over. I am still in shock, I think. I just fell over in the most ungainly and spectacular way, on a perfectly flat footpath.

Thank god I am still young enough to call it 'falling over' rather than 'having a fall'. And thank god there were no passers-by, because the very worst thing about falling over is the indignity of witnesses: the people who say, "Are you okay?"

Here's how it happened. I was hurrying to catch a particular tram in order to make a carefully pre-planned three-stage trip to Brunswick (east-west transport is really tricky in the inner north). I wasn't running, but I was taking quick, long strides with lots of forward momentum.

I was also wearing what I, laughably, refer to as my 'glamour heels'. These are a pair of Grosby Mary-Janes with a stubby 2cm heel that I purchased to wear to Lorelei's birthday party, for which I dressed up as Phryne Fisher. I am so bad at wearing heels that even though a granny would consider these comfort shoes, I still require silicon gel insoles at both the ball and heel, and even then my feet still hurt when wearing these shoes all day. That is how incapable of wearing heels I am.

So I was walking down Rathdowne Street and, rather than putting my weight squarely on my right heel, I managed to step on the edge of my heel and it slipped right out from under me. This has happened to me before (usually while wearing shoes or boots with a solid heel) and I can usually compensate for the missed step with a couple of quick counterbalancing steps.

But this time, the steps were not correcting my forward momentum. They were actually making it worse. I had the horrible realisation that I was running at the ground and was actually accelerating towards an inevitable fall. The inevitability of it was a terrible feeling.

So I decided to give in to the fall before I slammed into the ground on my face. After one last futile step, I let go and collapsed on my right side. My glasses flew off and clattered to the footpath a metre away. My hair came undone. To an onlooker, it must have looked as if I'd done a jaunty little Wizard of Oz dance, then been pushed over from behind.

As soon as I'd established there were no onlookers, I checked myself for injuries. Astoundingly I am almost unharmed and my clothes are not dirty or torn. I have a slight gravel rash on my palms and maybe on my right knee (my tights are okay but the knee is sore). My right elbow hurts a little when I extend it, but my winter overcoat protected me from anything worse.

I feel so pleased with my stunt. If you are going to fall over, it pays to do it in winter while well padded and wearing 80 denier tights.

I am live-blogging this from the front bar of the Retreat. This whole rigmarole was to get to Andrew McDonald's birthday drinks which are being held at some hipster speakeasy upstairs that I dimly recall being written up in ThreeThousand recently. It is so exclusive that it is at capacity and after all this, they won't even let me in.

I'll tell you, after waiting in the cold to get into the MIFF opening night after-party last week while the bouncers let random people in because they were apparently more important than me, hanging around outside a venue whose capacity is too small for the number of invited guests is not an attractive prospect. If I still can't get in after I finish this pint, me and my stupid shoes are going home.