The sweet surprise of an elderly Frenchwoman

As a counterpoint to Don Quixote (below), I recommend watching the footage captured earlier this week of a 101-year-old French woman meeting Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel at the First World War Remembrance services in Paris. The two leaders were doing the usual crowd flesh-pressing when the lady, coming face to face with Mrs Merkel, inquired: “Are you Madame Macron?”

Mrs Merkel replied: “No, I’m the German chancellor!”

The lady replied, in wonder: “Oh, that’s not possible! You’re an extraordinary person!” Then she exclaimed: “You mustn’t make me cry.” As the two leaders posed either side of her for a photograph, she was overcome with emotion. “It’s fantastic,” she murmured, “this happening to a simple woman like me!”

The awestruck face of this self-confessed “simple woman”, who had gone out that day merely to remember the dead and suddenly felt herself elevated to a moment of history, is a perfect foil to Cervantes’ blustering knight errant.

Michelle Obama hugged the Queen, she revealed this week in her book, in a moment of empathy after they had Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel move an elderly lady to tears on the WW1 anniversary commiserated with each other about how uncomfortable their shoes were. The former first lady admitted that she committed the ceremonial faux pas because she felt “a connection” with HRM.

“I confessed then to the Queen that my feet were hurting. She confessed that hers hurt, too. We looked at each other then with identical expressions, like: When is all this standing around with world leaders going to finally wrap up? And with this, she busted out with a fully charming laugh,” Mrs Obama writes. “We were just two tired ladies oppressed by our shoes.”

You could hardly find a better illustration of the little ways in which norms dig their claws into us, all the way up and down the social ladder.

I remember the moment I broke free from the tyranny of high heels. It was at some point during my years at university, around the time that I realised the total futility of women’s magazines, that I was suddenly struck with a revelation: I don’t have to participate in this. I can’t walk properly in high heels. I don’t have to wear them, ever.

Sometimes, liberation is a state of mind, not a political event.