My feet had become so white and feminine that I committed myself to walk around barefoot as much as I could, which is not so weird now that I live close to the beach. I even felt pretty cool.

For a few weeks, it went well. Slowly the lily white dulled to just white, and the skin on my sole is began to leather. All great, until I got a splinter in my heel.

My first lesson, don’t live alone.

I’ve discovered there are some practical things that you simply cannot do yourself, and there is no obvious ‘tradie’ to call around. I literally cannot get my eyes into an adequate position to squarely examine the splinter in my heel and then carefully extract it with a pin or tweezers.

My daughter is away, and while the couple next door and their dog are very friendly, we’ve chatted only a few times and I can’t bring myself to impose by asking the bloke’s girlfriend to work on my foot with tweezers.

I guess there is the option of asking him, but there are some things I don’t trust men with. I suspect that in the hierarchy of tasks that are best suited to women, my guess is this tops the list. It might sound sexist, but this is women’s work.

I even considered visiting my ex-wife and pleading for a favour, but here too I thought better of it, imagining myself in a vulnerable position while she prodded at me with a sharp instrument. At the very least, while the thorn may be liberated, I can’t see the exchange being costless for me.

Then I went to the chemist. I heard that pharmacists are allowed to give ‘advice’ on basic medical matters and was hoping this extended to splinter removal. Ah, nope.

I was instead upsold on an ointment called ‘Splintex’ which supposedly, seemingly magically, extracts the splinter through a process called ‘osmosis’, according to the package. It didn’t work for me.

It was all becoming a bit hopeless, so I braced and resolved to operate on myself by manipulating my leg as best I could. You know that exercise where you pull your foot to your bum in order to stretch your quadricep muscle?

By doing that and twisting my torso and neck, I could get direct sight of the black splinter buried under my skin. Up until then, I’d viewed it only through an image taken by my phone camera.

Given one hand was pulling my foot, I only had one free to perform the surgery, and the arm holding the hand was on the wrong side.

Yes, I was leaning against the wall for balance, yet the strain and discomfort of the yoga-like pose meant I couldn’t hold still. The needle kept jabbing and piercing in the wrong spots. My concentration was so intense, I think I forgot to breathe, got lightheaded and then just fell over.

Perhaps it was better to live with it and let the thorn work itself out naturally. Google was not encouraging of this strategy. I read that sometimes splinters will come out and sometimes they do not. It is possible, apparently, for a splinter to go even deeper and cocoon in, becoming a permanent ‘foreign body’.

Now I started ringing medical centres to book a registered nurse.

In all, I rang the receptions of four centres. Each put me on hold for a minimum of five minutes. It was interesting how the recorded messages were all similar, differentiated only by hold music.

They all advised me to ring 000 if a medical emergency. They all recommended booking online, including through a system called HotDoc. And they all had protocols protecting the clinic against Covid exposure.

What none of them had, was what I wanted… A timely appointment with someone to take out the thorn.

One centre had a nurse on standby, but on hearing about my case, she told the receptionist to dissuade me from booking in. Her argument was that if the thorn was too deep, she would have to call in the GP. But all the GPs were booked out. I was advised to try somewhere else.

I was about to ask the receptionist for more detail, such as exactly what depth of thorn would trigger a handball to the GP? And how would I go about measuring the depth?

And then I realised I was setting myself up for one of those depressing ‘to and fro’ conversations when someone had already made up their mind.

I was now in quite a dilemma. Last year I’d visited the North Shore ED for what turned out to be a trivial complaint. Ironically it was also concerning a foot.

Presenting again with a small thorn would get my file stamped ‘systemic hypochondriac’. I’d also just read that someone died in Adelaide, waiting to be admitted to an overflowing ED.

As I write, the thorn is still in situ. It has stopped me from walking and jogging and there is no obvious remedy in my grasp.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

One, don’t get divorced. Two, take extra precautions when your daughter leaves town. Third, don’t rely on the medical system. And four, be happy with white, feminine feet.

I guess the latter is just a subset of one of the pillars of Woke philosophy: love and celebrate the body you’re in. Perhaps the wokesters are not as crazy as I’ve always believed.

Nick Hossack is a public policy consultant. He is former policy director at the Australian Bankers’ Association and former adviser to Prime Minister John Howard.