I’m wandering along a High Street with an hour to kill and a credit card limit not quite reached and wondering how I can turn this day off work into a bit of a treat.

So far I have put out the bins, cleaned the cat lit tray, shouted at the cat for peeing on the floor while I was doing so, cleaned up floor, and cleaned up cat and self. I’ve also paid some bills, bought stamps and replaced the head of the mop.

If I were Celia Johnson now, I’d catch a train to a nearby little town and go to the cinema and meet a charming handsome doctor with a GSOH but passionate interest in respiratory diseases and began a brief encounter with him before heading back home again to darn socks in front of my husband.

But I’m not Celia Johnson. I’m just one of millions of women who dream of having free afternoons to themselves, rather than 22 days’ annual leave of which about seven will be spent on simply catching up with the chores they didn’t quite get round to at the weekend.

I pass shop windows full of beachwear and cut-price footballs and pretty sandals and then I see a sign saying “come in to make an appointment” and think, yes, it’s probably about time a chiropodist looked at my feet again.

My last chiropody treatment was the week before I got married, I think, and in the intervening 33 years I have managed to cultivate a pair of heels that wouldn’t look out of place on a bull elephant. The soles of my feet are so hard that I only bother wearing slippers because they match my pyjamas, rather than because they separate my feet from the floor.

I go in and make an appointment, which luckily is the following second, and am led through to a small cubicle where a young man called a podiatrist is waiting for me with a large pot of warm water and a range of tools that look like they’ve come loose from a Swiss army knife.

So what’s the difference between a chiropodist and a podiatrist, I ask him suspiciously. I’m going to be paying close on thirty quid for this session and I’m already wondering if I’ve been duped into paying for an alternative practitioner who thinks you can cure corns with the shake of a camomile stick and a whiff of incense.

But he’s having none of it. Chiropody is the old name for podiatry he explains, and then warming to his subject he takes me through some of the more challenging, er, challenges of dealing with conditions of the lower limb, with highlights including bunions – or hallux valgus as we like to call it – and lowlights including fallen arches.

It turns out that he went to university just round the corner from where I used to work, which is suddenly unaccountably fascinating, and it also turns out that I have fallen arches, which explains why my lower limbs attempt to turn themselves into elephant’s feet. It’s the pressure, you see.

All the time he’s telling me this, he’s washing my feet and carefully cutting my toenails and taking the Swiss army knife to those pesky rogue heels.

Then out comes the foot cream – it contains urea, he explains, but I don’t think I want to know any more than that – and he massages it gently into my feet and telling me how one day he may try to work in Canada or Australia or New Zealand. I close my eyes and wonder how I’ve accidentally managed not to move somewhere like that.

There we are then, he says, and my eyes shoot open and I’m not on a boat on one of the Great Lakes scouring the shores for bears at all, but getting up from the chair and making my way to the counter.

I don’t think I need to see you for about six months now, he says. Six months? Six long months? Let me be the judge of that, I think.

As soon as I get home I turn over four weeks in my diary and carefully write: Make Appointment with Podiatrist.