Love them or hate them, the British have always been a bit extreme about boots. A boot stamping on a human face – forever – was Orwell’s image of the totalitarian future. Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, had a friskier attitude to winter footwear, if her most famous remark is anything to go by: "The Duke returned from the wars today and did pleasure me in his top-boots."

All that was back in the days when boots were workmanlike bits of kit, to be pulled on to face mud and storms and yanked off again at the door (or not, in the Duke of Marlborough’s case). Today, thanks to the ad agencies, there’s an extra ingredient in our thinking about boots. It is lifestyle fantasy, the big dream we have about how we’d like to live that compels us to buy most of the small stuff filling up our homes.

It’s the same irrational impulse that makes some of us yearn for great gas-guzzling 4x4s to take the children down two streets to their inner-city school, or, when we can’t afford the haute couture in Vogue, to at least buy the insanely expensive perfume.

It has to be admitted that there’s almost nothing that London’s tame winter weather can throw at us that really justifies cladding ourselves up to the knee in the finest leather for half the year. Yet buying boots is a relatively innocent and harmless way to indulge whatever bordello/militaristic/cowboy/ huntin’shootin’fishin’ dreams we may have, since it involves nothing more drastic than a brief, relatively inexpensive and highly pleasurable trip to a shop once a year. It’s one manifestation of lifestyle fantasy that can safely be encouraged.

So, now that every shop window in London seems to be packed to bursting with a bumper seasonal boot harvest, and every woman in the streets I’m in seems to be loitering longer than strictly necessary before the glowing items in question, I’m ready to buy.

But this year I won’t be going to a shop for ordinary boots. This year I know a boot maker. This year I’ll be buying my dream of winter luxury straight from her.

Lucinda Norreys is the child of a marriage made in New York – between a beautiful Cuban mother, a refugee from revolution in Havana , and a glamorous London socialite father. When Ian Board, proprietor of Soho’s raffish Colony Room drinking den, died in 1995, it was Lucinda’s father whose anecdote made all the obituaries. "He had a scarlet nose, just like WC Fields," Christopher Moorsom said; "and when he died his nose went white."

Now a grown-up Lucinda has come back from seven years living in Spain with her husband and two small boys. She’s got a commercial glint in her eye, designs and swatches of leather and shot silk all over the kitchen table she proudly claims to have picked up for £50, and a roomful of beautiful footwear that she designed and had made up by an Andalusian cobbler whose day job is cowboy boots.

She wants to sell to the solid, luxury-goods, Asprey-shopping market and has designed her website accordingly: www.norreys.net. She’s got Harrods and Kurt Geiger outlets to stock the boots. I can understand her reasoning. The basic shape of her boots is that of riding boots and cowboy boots – there are solid, energetic, sweaty horsy genes somewhere inside them, the same genes that give the grimly traditional tweedy clothes and boots they sell on St James’ and around clubland their grimly traditional shapes.

But Lucinda’s boots are a cut above those bright huntinshootinfishin orangy-brown and greeny-black hideosities bought (I devoutly hope) only by colour-blind and misguided Japanese tourists. They have style. They have charm. They have eccentricity. The particular black faux-riding boots I want, for instance, don’t just have flat heels and some rather lovely stitching on the decorative band around the top. They also have an extraordinary tassel – with a hint of flamenco dancer or striptease artiste - flowing seductively from knee height all the way to the ground. Best of all, the tassel is detachable. On flamboyant days, you can swing and jiggle all the way to work or out clubbing. On quiet, purposeful days – when you might feel like mounting an actual horse and hacking through country lanes, or doing something energetic to your allotment, you can remove the tassel and the secret of last night’s urban frivolity will be safe.

So I’m pleased to see she’s been discussing how to make being a designer work with Lulu Guinness, an altogether wackier visionary than the purveyors of posh clothing on St James' and a mistress of turning traditional handbaggery on its head. Lucinda is bound to realise soon enough that the real charm of her boots is their weird mixture of all the bits of her past -- a bit of Chelsea girl, a bit of art school, a hint of gaucho machismo, flamenco dancing and cigar ash, a folk memory of running away from Castro with diamonds in heels and corsets, and a flick of up-all-night in London and New York’s most  depraved drinking dens. Real-life Kinky Boots, as in the film, but with no need to take on transvestites to give them that extra bit of ooh-la-la that makes all the difference.

Once Lucinda realises that her boots have enough kick for Kate Moss to model post-Fall, and starts marketing their urban appeal more than their (undeniable) quality, she's going to get rich. You'll all want her boots. But I'll have got there first. I'll already be dancing through the dead leaves with my perfect, raffish, multiculti Londoner's feet, looking smug and jiggling my tassels.

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