The UN has warned that AIDS is now the biggest killer worldwide of women of reproductive age.

One reason is that the majority of women worldwide - some 70 per cent - have at some point been forced to have unprotected sex. Fundamentally, new research shows, it is men's violence against women that is leading to the rise in AIDS. 

A bigger argument for the empowerment of women could scarcely be thought of. Women throughout history have been subject to violence and rape at the hands of men, and now that can lead not only to injury, unwanted pregnancy and psychological trauma, but also to death at an early age.

It is sometimes easy for us to forget this in the West, where we kid ourselves that we're 'equal', but in much of the world, women cannot even control the most basic matters about their own lives such as their reproductive rights, who they have sex with, whom they marry, how they work or whether they can own property.  

In South Africa - one of the most 'macho' nations in the world - HIV infection is three times more common in young women than in young men, partly due to the prevalence of rape in that society. And in sub-Saharan Africa, the biggest risk factors for AIDS are not to be gay, promiscuous or an intravenous drug user but to be a young married woman. Marriage effectively makes a woman a chattel of her husband in many societies, and their subordinate position makes it impossible for women to insist on safe sex.

In the light of this new research, the UN says it will now incorporate action against violence against women into its worldwide programme to conquer HIV.

Yesterday was the anniversary of the introduction of food rationing in the UK, and what a shock to find that Marguerite Patten, doyenne of cookery writers, is still alive and kicking. I've got a couple of her cookery books.

My parents both served in the war, but for those in civilian life, food rationing is one of the things they remember with the least fondness. Bad enough having bombs dropped on you, your kids sent away for safety, your spouse training in some army camp, without food itself being difficult to obtain. 

Well, that's the received opinion, but in my family, it's taken with a pinch of salt. One reason that food rationing was introduced, let us remember, was that when the general mobilisation took place, so many men were found to be unfit for service due to malnutrition.

The pale, spavined, rickety product of a 10-year economic depression - a time when many people suffered from anaemia due to lack of meat, there was no NHS so ailments went untreated, and most people did grinding manual labour - came as a shock to the authorities.

They instantly instituted a rationing programme to bring Britain UP to standard, as well as prevent waste and food hoarding. For my family, as for many other working families, they had never eaten so WELL.

Certainly the diet was boring. Without our massive empire to exploit, Britons suddenly had to grow our own food instead of nicking it from people we'd conquered, and we'd halfway forgotten how to do it. We learned quickly, though, and God bless the Ministry of Food's efficiency in ensuring its fair distribution and that the population didn't starve to death.

I searched online for articles about the subject yesterday and found a few of those gosh-wow-how-DID-they-manage-without-microwaves? type features so beloved of the tabloids as if we all slept on swansdown. In this kind of feature, people follow the wartime diet for a week, suffer the ghastly pangs of Diet Coke withdrawal and end by wondering how on earth people coped without mooli and garangal.

Well, they didn't all live on powdered egg and Spam, I tell you what. A lot of them did what my family did: they poached, they kept chickens on any spare bit of ground, or a pig out the back; they planted potatoes; they learned to stretch meat; they grew their own herbs, they made bread pudding and Poor Knights of Windsor. In fact, that's how I grew up too, in the 60s and 70s, eating pheasant full of buckshot, jugged hare poached by my dad's workmates and fish caught by the local Jehovah's Witnesses (don't ask me why - they had their own boat).

One writer, eating a Woolton pie (a kind of shepherd's pie with root veg instead of meat, shown at top left) proclaimed it as tasting like cheesy slime. No it bloody doesn't. A properly cooked Woolton pie is really tasty, but you have to know how to cook, not just take the top off an M&S ready meal. Ye gods. Have Britons really turned into such a bunch of wimps? Two rashers of bacon a week? A bar of chocolate a week? That's all we eat in this house to this day. 

Oh well, enough rant. It seems a far cry from then to Good New Days of today, when we chuck a third of our food in bins and leave it to rot.  So much cleverer than our ancestors, drowning in a sea of our own plenty...

If you do even the most cursory study into what you, personally, can do to save the planet and benefit your health at the same time, it becomes uncomfortably apparent that you should probably give up meat.

All in all, meat is a pretty bad idea. Animal fats are the biggest cause of coronary heart disease in the west. Cows and pigs bred for meat use up a huge amount of land that could be put to agricultural use. Obtaining meat involves slaughtering the animal, to its inevitable suffering. Acres of Brazilian rainforest are lost every day in order to put land to meat production - mainly for populations that are already obese. 

Well, we all know the math. 

The problem for the average Brit is that our whole cuisine is founded on meat. And most of us enjoy meat. There is something about getting your gnashers round a nice juicy steak that a carrot burger just can't match. But at the same time, most of us don't relish the idea of the animal suffering so that we can eat it. So we do that fancy mental two-step that enables us to carry on doing something we know at heart is morally reprehensible.

Our Christian heritage is also a problem. Unlike some other religions, there has never been a moral imperative in Christianity to avoid meat in the modern era. Fish on Fridays is an idea long-gone, and for many centuries, access to meat for many people was so rare in any case that choosing to avoid it was not an issue. People ate meat whenever they could get their hands on it.

That situation is markedly different in other parts of the world. Jains in India, for instance, abstain from all meat and fish on the principles of non-violence. They also don't eat eggs; honey; any vegetable that 'bleeds' like blood when it's cut; root vegetables, in case insects are killed when they're harvested; or after sunset - in case insects are fatally drawn to the lamplight. One way or another, I sometimes wonder what Jains actually have left to live on. 

However, the rich tradition of vegetarianism that results from these strictures, and is found elsewhere in the East, particularly wherever there is a Buddhist tradition, results in a fabulous vegetarian cuisine - something we lack in the west. Eating veggie meals becomes positively enticing when a big Thali is laid out before you.

I would therefore advise anyone who wants to cut down their meat consumption to look to other cuisines for vegetarian inspiration, especially Indian. And if not Indian, then Mexican, or Spanish, or French, or Italian - all of these traditions have excellent veggie meals, such as pizza, ratatouille, chilli, guacamole etc, which are eaten simply as part of the cuisine, not as poor substitutes for meat-based meals, as so much British vegetarian cuisine seems to be. 

You could start by having one veggie day a week. In this house, it's usually Wednesday - the mid-week meal - and we'll generally have something like a ratatouille or a non-meat chilli, or a chickpea curry.

Even if you never progress further than this and remain a meat-eater the rest of the week, you have just dramatically reduced your carbon footprint - and that's something worth aiming for.

Plenty of people have a problem with moles, but it's usually in the garden. Mine, unfortunately, are on the body.

As I type, I am trying not to think about the amount of pain I'm in. Yesterday I had two moles removed from the sole of my left foot, and next week I go back to have another one taken from my little toe. 

I did not know - as I find many others do not - that moles on the sole of your foot are inherently dangerous. This is a prime site for melanoma, as the sole of the foot is so vulnerable to injury. 

It was my podologist who spotted them and ordered me to see a dermatologist. It was a long wait for an appointment and I put it to the back of my mind until the actual day. My huge relief when she said they were not (yet) cancerous was replaced by apprehension when she warned me that the operation would be very painful and the anaesthetic can give you heart palpitations. 

When it comes to putting myself into other people's care, I am nervous at the best of times, so yesterday was quite a bad day. And having convinced myself that she was only covering her arse in telling me about the pain, I was taken aback by the unbelievable trauma of the injections. 

The reason, I suppose, is that the sole of the foot is well supplied with nerve endings and every one of them was jangling. It felt like the surgeon had put a spear in my foot and was crunching it around in the bones. Later, I discovered, grunting in pain, that I'd bitten a section off the inside of my cheek. 

All went fairly well then until some six hours later when the lidocaine wore off, to be followed by ten hours of searing nerve pain from the tips of my toes to my knee and, consequently, very little sleep. Luckily that has now reduced to a bearable level of 'ordinary' pain, so all that remains is for the wounds to heal. 

I have been ordered to walk on the foot as normal, which is no picnic. If I don't, the scars won't heal properly, as the natural tendency is to curl the foot up and keep weight off it. So, like love's young dream, I am hobbling around with a stick, feeling nauseous with pain and cursing the ineffectiveness of paracetamol. 

Oh la. Well, at least it is done, and it will be the worst of them, I hope. Fingers crossed for next week. 

I came across a refreshing article in the Guardian today, detailing the quiet, secret love of British women for their comfy shoes. 

Well, thank God, really. I wouldn't want to think that real people were actually trying to walk around in what the fashion industry thinks are shoes. These great clumpy, pointy foot-torturers are meant for sitting down in or having sex in, not for actually walking around the place. 

The writer says that she likes heels so that she can look men in the eye. Well, that's never been an option for me. A 4" heel would bring me up to 5' 5", so I'd still be looking up. And the truth is, a great many advantages in my life have come to me from being small, so it's really not a problem.

But I don't wear high heels because my comfort remains more important to me than anything else, and that's a decision I made a very long time ago. My flirtation with higher than high heels was very brief - probably a few months when I was 18 (and by high, I mean a 3" heel). A 'slipped disc' at the age of 11 taught me everything else I needed to know - my back will simply not stand for heels that are too high, and the truth is, neither will most women's.

High heels - which medically speaking means 2" and above - put a dreadful strain on your gearing, particularly the knees (this is why double arthritis of the knee is almost unknown in men). Women have FOUR TIMES as many leg and back joint problems as men, and the primary cause is wearing high heels. It is just not worth it - sex appeal or no sex appeal, women cannot spend all their time trying to appeal to men as if there was nothing else in life. 

It is, admittedly, harder to look 'stylish' in flats, and this is partly to do with shoe designers not giving a flying fuck about those of us who don't want to totter about like pigs on stilts. It is terribly hard to find nice flat shoes - most of them are ugly and thoughtless. Boots are often a far better option. 

One of the reasons for my love of trousers, incidentally, is my love of flat shoes. When you wear skirts, your eye draws down the length of the body and ends in - what? a great clumpy pair of Crocs, or loafers, or Uggs. But when your shoes are only peeking out of the bottom of a pair of long, long trousers, you can get away with nearly anything - at this time of year, I'm mostly in Uggs, wellies or leather riding boots, which has been my winter wardrobe for over 10 years. For summer, as aforementioned, I'm now a convert to Crocs - can't wait to get my next pair.

For a range of pretty, flat shoes that a girl can actually walk in, visit Clarks.