The other day, I was on my way to a meeting and had some time to kill and as I am now wearing work shoes every day, I thought it might be worth buying myself some new ones.

Now I’m a size 9 generally and that was – as far as I knew – Mr. Average when I was younger, though nowadays it appears that bigger is the norm. Anyway, you don’t really want to look like a cross between between Krusty the Clown and Aladdin, I’d have thought, so why do blokes seem to want to buy ridiculously long shoes with pointy or cut-off pointy ends?

I tried on a Hush Puppies pair that looked like a halfway decent Oxford but hadn’t realised the extent of the shaped toe which made the shoe a good couple of inches longer than my present pair. Why?