Passing through a metal detector to make sure no one is carrying a gun, is one thing, but things are rapidly changing. Carry bags could be impounded in order to ensure you are not secreting any rotting tomatoes, eggs or fruit. Soon you will see rows upon rows of shoes lined up at the entrance to a public meeting, like outside a mosque, if the shoe-throwing craze gets any further out of control. People will either have to begin carrying an extra pair of shoes, or you’ll see hoards of one-shoed people hobbling home after attending public meetings. Either way, shoe manufacturers will do a roaring trade.

When the Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, was addressing students at Cambridge University in England, he was called a dictator, as an angry objector tried to hit the guest speaker with his shoe. “How can the university ********** itself with this dictator”? he screamed from the back of the audience. The police made an arrest on suspicion of a public order offence. Mr Wen described the incident as ‘despicable’, while the Chinese government denounced is as deplorable.

This comes hot on the heels of the episode of the angry Iraqi journalist who wanted to hit the USA president, George W. Bush. While Mr Bush joked about the episode later, the journalist is facing up to fifteen years imprisonment, if the charges of aggression against a foreign head of state are proven.

Around one hundred protesters, armed with mountains of shoes, gathered together outside the White House, on the last day of George Bush’s administration. “Don’t hit me”, beamed one of the officers on duty behind the White House fence, as shoes fell all around him. Thousands decided to join the protestors and stopped to fling a shoe over the fence. “It’s not that we **** Bush, we just **** what he has done to the country”, explained one protester. Many of the people felt it was a healthy way to get the Bush era out of their system. It took a small truck to carry all the shoes away.

However, shoetime was actually commenced with Nikita Khrushchev, the Russian Premier, when in 1956 he smashed his shoe onto the speaker’s podium, saying that the US economy would bury capitalism. Maybe he was speaking prophetically?

Krushchev then followed this with another eruption at the United Nations when he lost it with the Philippine delegation, telling them they were nothing more than an American stooge.

No matter how you look at these episodes, being a shoe manufacturer in the present economical climate, could be a once in a lifetime Blue Moon Opportunity.