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The company that made the REAL Uggs never trademark the name, so the Uggs sold today is from a different company that stole the name.

I agree. They were originally designed as apres surfing wear in Australia, and in my days as a student at the University of Sydney they were standard lounge-about and study wear. Everybody had them. They were inexpensive and comfortable.. The fact that they now command big prices never ceases to amaze me. Some years later when I was living in Melbourne, Uggs had slipped down the social scale a bit and were often being worn by the rough crowd in lower socio-economic neighbourhoods - the sort of rather sleazy types who wear track suits everywhere today. One such suburb was Heidelberg, in the city's inner east, where Ugg's popularity was such that they became derisively known as "Heidelberg stilettos".

My wife has refused to wear heels for many years. I told her someone in this family needs to wear heels so I guess I'll have to do it. I have bought her some lace up ankle boots. I seem to be an extremist is some ways. I either like very pretty shoes or the ortho looking shoes/boots. I have several lace up ankle boots. Only nice leather, no suede, snake, ETC. I actually believe that the go-go boots helped to take heels out of style in the later 1960s. The evolution of the low heel. It kills me to see Bewitched episodes with Elizabeth Montgomery in those low heel rounded toe shoes. In the later episodes she had nicer hair but bad fashions.

One of the additional strings to my bow as a freelance writer and photographer is escorting tour groups - giving lectures etc. I don't do a lot of it, three or four times a year, but the gigs are always nice ones and takes me to interesting places. I used to go all over the world, as with my other assignments, but these days, having grown weary of flying and all the attendant hassles, I stick to Britain. At any rate, I am on such a trip now. Yesterday I was taking to my group about Charles II. In addition to talking about the politics of the Restoration I talked about his coronation portrait - now hanging in the throne room in Holyrood House in Edinburgh. Aside from his holding a sceptre and orb, as symbols of newly restored royal power, he's wearing four inch heels. I mentioned this fact to see the reaction. It was dispiriting, but not surprising. My group, 24 elderly Americans, smirked, sniggered, mocked, and cooed and ran through all the trite schoolground mockery. There was something so drearily predictable, unthinking and Pavlovian about it. I explained the history of heels, how they'd been a masculine fashion and how the cultural shifts in the Age of Enlightenment, with his emphasis on science, philosophy, comics and political thought changed men's fashion forever, while women, seen as ineducable, were allowed to keep their pretty colours, laces, silks and heels. My group were quite interested, I could see that, but then, as though on replay came the same smirking, cooking and mocking yet again. It was like they were on a continuous loop, stuck in a rut. Part of me felt like telling them I had a pair of 12cm stilettos in my room I am practicing with, but I need this gig.