My daughter's gym knickers (and other humiliations)

I lay there, like a vast woolly sheep on its back, in front of a room full of amused spectators

Public humiliation is certainly easier to stomach if afterwards you can console yourself with a session of retail therapy to the tune of £10,000. That, apparently, is how much David Beckham spent on clothes after being sentenced to 45 minutes in the stocks last Wednesday night with millions of people hurling rotten fruit at him.

OK, OK, he didn't actually have his hands and feet thrust into wooden restrainers and a barrage of rotten apples chucked at his head. He was sitting on the subs' bench during the first half of the championship match between Man U and Real Madrid at Old Trafford but I bet from his point of view it felt equally bad.

It's his wife I feel sorry for, of course. Dear Victoria and their two lovely children Alfa and Romeo. I know exactly how they feel. We're talking oaks and acorns here but when, last year, my 12-year-old son who plays rugby for his school was dropped from the A team to the B team, the weight of his misery and mortification, heavy as a horse blanket, hung just as suffocatingly on me as it did on him.

I tried everything: retail therapy, of course (not quite on the Beckham scale but, at the end of the day, as I'm sure Becks would agree, a new pair of socks is a new pair of socks), supper at Pizza Express, a weekend without going to see Granny, even a contract to take out Mr Bettinson, the sports master, or Tommy, the boy who had replaced him as scrum half. No dice.

Finlay, who I need hardly say was named at his father's insistence after the famous Scottish international Finlay Calder, was inconsolable. Compared to my son's suffering, Satan's demotion from Premier Division, Heaven to Third Division, Hell in Paradise Lost was little more than a yellow card, a glitch, a superficial graze needing no more than a dab of Savlon and a waterproof plaster.

Thank God he's back in the As with, one hopes, a rather more compassionate attitude for the underdog than before.

I've lost count of the times I've been publicly humiliated. There was the night I tripped, eight months pregnant, over the last step leading down to the Dorchester Hotel's crowded cocktail bar and, like a vast woolly sheep on its back, lay there on the floor arms and legs flailing in front of a room full of amused spectators. Eventually an elegant young man detached himself from his martini and hauled me weeping – me not him – to my feet. It's all right I've got a handkerchief, I sobbed, rummaging in my handbag and dabbing my streaming eyes. Except that it wasn't a handkerchief – it was my six-year-old daughter's gym knickers in need of new elastic.

Even that was peanuts compared to a certain evening in Gray's Inn in the memory of which, even now nearly 20 years on, makes me cringe or hyperventilate or gnaw my nails to the knuckles. I'd been invited to speak at a guest evening attended, I suppose, by law students. It was all very grand, a great hall with polished refectory tables and portraits of successful old boys who really did become bigwigs, like Lord Birkenhead, on the walls. I was on the top table seated beside a couple of incredibly charming, smooth-talking legal luminaries with names like Havers and Du Cann and very nice it was too, until I rose to speak.

No, of course I don't remember what I was talking about, but I doubt it had anything to do with the finer points of jurisprudence or the unbearable lightness of being. In any case I don't really speak – I witter, which may have been the problem. Minutes, possibly seconds, after I'd started there were cries of "Rubbish" and "Rhubarb" and whistles and bits of bread rolls being lobbed at the top table. In short, m'lud, the guest evening at Gray's Inn had become a bun fight.

Havers, or possibly Du Cann, came chivalrously to my rescue crying: "Gentlemen, gentlemen, please let the lady speak," but their blood was up and the wild rumpus, as Maurice Sendak might have called it, got even wilder.

A couple of years later a curious thing happened. I was having dinner in a Chinese restaurant in Soho and afterwards had difficulty getting into the ladies' because a girl, who had evidently just washed her bright green mohican hair in the basin, was crouched under the hand drier drying it off. You're Sue Arnold, she said. I agreed, but how did she know? Because, she said, she'd been a law student at that fateful Gray's Inn dinner. Funny old world, eh?