Alice Wylie: 'The things we are caught saying are just the tip of the backstabbing iceberg'

I AM a sinner, though perhaps one not quite so penitent as Gordon Brown. You see, in the past week I've been caught up in a bitchy, backstabbing scandal of my own, though it's not so much Bigotgate as Bootgate.

Like GB, I made an unfortunate comment about someone, believing they'd never know. And it's got me into rather a lot more trouble than his merely calling someone a "bigoted woman".

Things start off innocently. I'm shoe shopping with the Best Friend when a pair of ill-advised cowboy boots catch his eye. He asks if he should try them on and I respond positively, knowing an amusing scene is about to unfold. As I watch him excitedly tugging the silly boots onto his size 13 feet, while telling the assistant – with a straight face – that "these are a tad more snug than my other cowboy boots", I stifle a giggle. As he struts the length of the shop in them, admiring them in those slanty floor mirrors, I can't help but text a mutual friend to fill him in on the campery unfolding on the shop floor. The message ends with the words "ugliest boots I've ever seen, AND they make his calves look fat".

As I hit "send", everything goes into slow motion, like the final scene in The Usual Suspects when the mug drops and we realise that Kevin Spacey is Keyser Sze. Slowly it dawns on me: I've sent the message not to the mutual friend, but to the subject of said catty text who is at this very moment gleefully examining the horrible boots from every angle.

Best Friend's phone beeps. Best Friend removes phone from pocket.

Best Friend looks confused as he asks why I'm texting him. Best Friend looks increasingly angry as he reads the text message. Best Friend fizzes in his cowboy boots; and were I too wearing boots, I'd be quaking in them.

I should have known better. I've read Atonement. I know that putting words out into the world that are never meant to be read or heard by certain people is a dangerous game. And while in Ian McEwan's classic, a letter that was never meant to be read – and therefore should never have been written – leads to our hero's eventual death, I feared a worse fate.

He has since forgiven me. And wisely chose not to purchase the boots. It's unlikely, however, that I have learned my lesson. When I read about Bigotgate, my first thought was that it could have been worse, when you consider what people say about others when they think they're out of earshot.

These moments – when a friend pulls the manic "he's behind you" eyes at a party, just as you're laying into your boss, when you accidentally phone someone in your pocket while you're muddying their name, when you leave your microphone on by mistake after a TV interview – are mere exclamation marks in the flowery passages of our bitchery.

As Best Friend ranted at me on the shop floor, all I could think was "if this tiny indiscretion makes you mad then you'd be a pretty angry fly on the wall of some of my conversations".

Because from Bootgate to Bigotgate, the things we are caught saying are just the tip of the backstabbing iceberg. Brown is sure to have said worse about voters behind closed doors, and I've certainly said a hell of a lot worse about Best Friend's footwear.