AH, THE ladies... what would we have done without their wisdom, finesse and charm in 2011?

These doughty daughters of the suffragettes who died for enfranchisement showed their forebears how well they were coping with total equality.

Accident departments across the country reported the highest-ever numbers of young women being carried in with broken and twisted ankles, all sustained when they fell from 5ins heels.

Despite warnings from doctors and physiotherapists that the human female is not meant to totter on her toes, and undeterred by pictures of Victoria Beckham sporting huge bunions from wearing her 6ins Christian Laboutins (£2,995 and Swarovski crystal encrusted) they continued to buy them.

Another puzzling female phenomenon was that strange whitening of dark skin. Rebecca Ferguson, that nice black Liverpudlian now in the charts after appearing on the X Factor a couple of years back, was shown with an almost white face on her album cover. So was Rihanna. And look at Janet Jackson’s new white face.

At the same time, a huge jump in skin-whitening products was reported – and the black women who rushed to buy them ignored health and safety advice that some of these potions, produced unlicensed in the Third World, were toxic.

We end the year puzzled that while those in the race relations industry tell us black is beautiful (as indeed it is), black women don’t object when their publicists portray them a whiter shade of pale. Sad, isn’t it?

Next up were the former fatties who’d all lost prodigious amounts of weight despite having told us for years they adored their blubber.

The once tent-sized Dawn French, who trilled that men loved fat women (in your dreams, fatso), showed us a new shape – although at 16 stone she shouldn’t rest on her laurels yet.

Pauline Quirke was another, visibly shrinking in Emmerdale but Jenni Murray, host of Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, who wrote many lines on her weight loss in 2010, was seen to have been back on the roast potato and mince pie diet when she revealed an avalanche of chins to receive an award from the Queen.

Oh, and just to show true British grit, desperate Fern Britton (gastric band fibber and newly tattooed) performed the splits on a largely ignored TV chat show in the hope of attracting attention.

Then there was a spate of street-fighting we all adored.

Rat-faced Ryan Giggs, caught offside with a ‘model’ in a posh hotel, was then shopped by his sister-in-law, another willing recipient of his favours.

He took out an injunction to gag the (model) – but it was his wife and her sister who tore out each other’s hair extensions in the restaurant while Giggs, villain of the piece, looked on and laughed at both women.