Sexualising my lower digits was bad enough. To be given the equivalent of a pat on the head and told ‘nice try’ was an indignity too far

Like most people, I’ve never had a particularly intimate relationship with my feet. They get me places and occasionally give me blisters, and that’s about it. I regard them as roughly on a par with my elbows – un-glamorous but mainly functional. That is, until I discovered them on Wikifeet.

If you’re not already familiar with Wikifeet, think of it as an online directory of celebrity foot pictures, lovingly maintained by a volunteer army of foot fetishists. I stumbled across it in 2022 while trying to Google a photo that somebody had taken of me at a fashion industry event. There I was, or rather there were my feet: on a kink website that gets 20m views a month. I had naturally assumed that journalists were not the target focus of a celebrity fetish website, given that I have yet to star in a James Bond film or become an Estée Lauder brand ambassador. Unfortunately, it seems like anybody who does a mildly public-facing job is considered fair game, and a few podcasts and brief TV appearances were enough for me to qualify.