You'll have noticed during the recent hot weather (weather is what goes on outside while you're inside worrying about the public money frittered away in worming Oliver Letwin's meerkat and the absurd cost to the taxpayers of repaving Ed Balls's head) that everybody has been getting their feet out. Getting them out in flip-flops, sandals and open-toed mules at the first hint of a break in the clouds.

Why? Heat rises (or hadn't you heard?). There is absolutely no reason why your feet, way down there at the bottom, should, in shoes and socks, get any hotter in summer than in winter. Your top half, sure, but not your feet. And your feet are ugly, bone ugly. They should stay under wraps.

Men's feet, in particular, make me squirm and gag: the mottled colouring, the sparse hair, the little toe that has been crushed into the one next to it over the years so that it has turned and bent and cuddles up against it now, sadly, as if trying to spoon an unwilling lover, the yellowed, cracked toenails, and the fully blackened one on the right biggy from toe-punting a goalpost 14 years ago. How can bringing these out in public be considered acceptable?

The sight of such a foot in flip-flops, walking on an urban street, in a shop, or on a bus, is just so wrong, the flappy plastic sole going slap, slap, slap against the sweaty arch. And sometimes you see people in flip-flops on the Underground. Seriously, aren't they worried that somebody will stamp on their toes - either accidentally or, if the somebody happens to be me, deliberately?

And I am no big fan of “style” sandals either, not the Jesus ones (the only time Jesus got it really wrong was in the shoe shop), nor the shiny Italian type with big lateral straps that some men seem to think it's OK to pair with shorts and a suit jacket and go to work in.

Worst of all are those preposterous action sandals in which men's gnarly white hoofs are strapped on to a black foam float with so many cross straps and bits of Velcro that it's basically a ventilated rambling boot - the ultimate Guardian reader's summer shoe. I saw Ranulph Fiennes advertising them once and, having previously rather admired the man, decided that henceforth I would regard every toe taken from him by frostbite as a blow struck for decency and good taste.

Nor are women's feet much better. They are usually smaller, at least, which is something. For less is most definitely more.

And they are sometimes better kept, even pedicured, to make a place for nail varnish. Oh, how women love to paint a toe.

For nine months of the year they can only slap brightly coloured chemicals over their eyes, lips, nose, cheeks, hair and fingernails. Summer opens up ten new little canvasses.

But they do it only when the sun first comes out and then very quickly lose interest in maintenance so that, as the nail grows, the painted bit gets smaller and travels towards the end of the foot, leaving a rough patch of sparse, unpainted keratin behind, which looks really slutty and grim.

And what's with all these women who don't really have a toenail on their little toe, just the merest sliver poking out in the middle, who then try and paint the toe around it to make it look bigger? Please don't do that, I've just had breakfast.

But then all women's open shoes are revolting. Those strappy mules where the sole rolls out of the end of a wide, asymmetric toe-hole so that the shoe looks like it is vomiting toes. Toes that are all pointing to an imaginary origin just in front of the middle toe because of being crammed into closed, pointy shoes all winter. And heels all red and covered in Elastoplasts because in early summer the bare skin is not yet used to the rub of the strap.

Worst of all are these quasi-bondage shoes of which, among others, Louis Vuitton does one called a “Spicy”, which involve a vertiginous heel sloping down to a 2in platform and the foot tied in with all sorts of ribbons and chains. I think it's meant to be a nod to fetish, but the effect is to make the wearer (who is paying maybe a grand a pair) look as desperate and slaggy as a pole dancer, while at the same time reminding us of the horrors of ancient Chinese foot-binding.

Why a woman would want to draw attention to her nasty little bunioned trotters on a night out, I just cannot imagine. I doubt they do. It's just that these are shoes designed by men who are not into women, and cannot bear to think too much about any part of them more intimate than their feet.

And it's not just shoes. All sorts of terrible things happen to our clothes in hot weather. Fat people, for example, suddenly start wearing trousers that come down only to mid-calf.

Challenged, they will say that these are more comfortable than full trousers. But of all the parts of a fat man's body that might be uncomfortable in clothes, you wouldn't imagine that his ankles were a major issue. How uncomfortable is the bottom of a trouser? It's trousers with no arse you'd think a fat person would want to wear, and shirts with slits for his bingo wings, and jumpers with a tyre-sized hole in the front to let his gut hang out, all cool and comfy.

I abhor skinny men, too, mind. Those horrible crew-cut lads who stride around topless in town, in their jeans and box-fresh trainers, alabaster-skinned with little pink nipples and pointy elbows pumping jerkily, like that's an okay way for a gentleman to be seen in public. But only here, only in Britain. In hot countries, never. And they're always tattooed. It gets worse every year.

You forget about it over the winter, when people are all nicely muffled in coats and scarves. And then there's a flicker of sun and in parks all over the country the unwashed hordes strip to their nuts to reveal meaningless symbols and foreign alphabets carved all over their skin.

Swimming at the Hampstead lido the other day, I felt like Captain Cook landing for the first time in Polynesia - the only unpainted man for thousands of miles. People gaped in awe at the aggressiveness of my undoodled carapace. I swear, so ubiquitous have tattoos become, so much the uniform of every naked Briton, that unpainted skin now seems rebellious and exotic. Being untattooed is the new tattoo.

A man sitting next to me by the pool had a large one on his arm of a man sitting on the toilet. When I asked him why, he said “it seemed like a good idea at the time”, and I tried desperately to imagine what sort of a time that might have been.

Another, a large, hard man apparently carved from teak, had “French Foreign Legion” written on his chest. I asked him if he had really been in the bloodthirsty Legion of which one hears such terrible things, and he leant towards me and growled: “It would be a f***ing stupid tattoo to 'ave if I 'adn't, wouldn't it?” And so I packed up my things and went quietly home.

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