The long and short of it is... I like tall!

I've never been one for joining things. It's always seemed utterly pointless to me to belong to any sort of club.

But this week I have come across something that has sorely tempted me to do just that. It's the Tall Persons Club of Great Britain.

You see, I'm ashamed to say that I'm a very heightist person. I really do feel more comfortable in the presence of tall people.

I think it's because when I stopped growing at the age of thirteen when I was a smidgen under six feet tall I towered over my classmates, and I was for years by far the tallest girl in my class.

I was the one made to stand centre back in all the photos, the one who always had to sit at the back of the class so I didn't block the view to the blackboard, and, probably worst of all, was made to be goalkeeper at netball, an utterly miserable fate in a school so good at sport that our opposing teams rarely got a chance to shoot.

I blame my mother for my heightist views. She was around five feet ten and drummed into me from the earliest age that tall was good and that short was, at best, unfortunate.

Later she suggested that I shouldn't consider a relationship with a man under 6ft 2in. Any such liason would have been, to her mind, totally unsuitable.

This somewhat limited the field, but my husband (6ft 1in) was deemed borderline acceptable.

Intriguingly he is spectacularly uninterested in height and doesn't appear to notice whether people are tall or short - unless they're either giants or midgets.

Come to think of it, I've got quite a lot of short friends these days. Well, when I say short... people under 5ft 10in,in fact  I don't think I'll bother joining the club at all!!