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The Darkling Plain

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The Darkling Plain A new year begins Well, here we are. About a couple of weeks into 2025. As we reached the Quarter Century out came the fireworks. Hurray! Auld Lang Syne, Peace and Goodwill, ring out the bells and all that. An opportunity to listen calmly to wise words from highly regarded world leaders offering us hope and optimism for the future and reassuring us that we are safe under their watch. Oh, sorry. No chance of any of that. Whatever were you thinking? Racing to the bottom Listen instead to the grating sound of people yelling and screaming and twittering at each other. Look at the rich, entitled and powerful who are taking offence at the smallest perceived slight as they desperately seek attention. Watch as people leap onto bandwagons and make pompous and abusive statements about things that they know nothing about and care even less. And notice how addressing the suffering in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Sudan and elsewhere is now much less important than the priorities of vario...
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The Seeping Stench of Violence

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The Seeping Stench of Violence November 25th is White Ribbon Day. Each year this date signals the start of 16 days of international activism to combat violence against women and girls. Its profile has grown during recent years and many organisations are gaining White Ribbon accreditation. Politicians are more involved; the media are reporting White Ribbon events, and and people are increasingly standing together to campaign against the insidious rise of violence. But the scale of it is almost impossible to absorb. Look at this dreadful statistic. EVERY ELEVEN MINUTES, ACROSS THE WORLD, A WOMAN OR GIRL IS KILLED IN HER OWN HOME. Unfortunately, much of this month’s blog makes grim reading. But it is so important to keep remembering that women are not safe, and that violence and domestic abuse are a terrible stain on humanity. Attention must be paid. So, before the Christmas jollifications begin, and before waves of sentimentality obscure and distort the reality, please, please, pause for...
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Drama Queen, Moaning Minnie, Jailbait?

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Drama Queen, Moaning Minnie, Jailbait? What's in a label? Shockingly, but also intriguingly, a body part of the mountaineer Sandy Irvine has been found on Mount Everest. He disappeared in 1924, and the find consisted of a boot and a sock containing the remains of his foot. We only know his name because of the embroidered name label neatly sewn into his sock. Those of us of a certain age will have mixed memories of name labels. Schools frequently demanded that they be attached to all garments, including those compulsory and terrible navy-blue knickers required for girls’ PE lessons. Shoes also had to be identifiable, and regular inspections ensured compliance. Name labels were as much a part of school life as textbooks covered in wallpaper and tiny bottles of tepid milk at break time. And of course, they are still quite useful for schools and other institutions, although now they are more likely to be adhesive and come in a variety of colours with added images of footballs, unicorns...
Location: Milton Keynes, UK
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SHUT UP!

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SHUT UP! ‘But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence’ As a starting point, and for a bit of a change, let’s begin on a pious note, with a biblical quotation. The ponderous words above are allegedly those of St Paul writing to his follower Timothy, a missionary. In fact, we may actually be looking at an early example of fake news as there is some debate about the authenticity of the epistle. But hey, when did a questionable piece of information ever stop anyone for relaying it (and in this case literally) as gospel truth? Ways of silencing women have persisted since the year dot. In Women and Power  Mary Beard describes what she calls the first example in Western literature of a man telling a woman to shut up. In The Odyssey , when Penelope enters a public area of the palace to make a complaint, her son, Telemachus, tells her to be silent, return to her own rooms and do women’s work, reminding her that public life is the exclusive re...
Location: Milton Keynes, UK
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August Reflections

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  August Reflections The Dog Days In late July and August, Sirius (known as the Dog Star), appears to rise at the same time as the sun. In Ancient Greece and Rome, the belief was that the combined heat of the two stars led to intolerable blazing hot weather, which in turn resulted in thunderstorms, fires, drought, high fever, and madness – a period known as the dog days. Today the phrase tends to evoke the hot, lazy days of summer, and until recently this time of year has been known as the ‘silly season’, described by the Cambridge Dictionary as a time:  ‘usually in the summer, when newspapers are full of stories that are not important because there is no important, especially political, news’.  The silly season, if it ever really existed, is now in the past, and today’s news bulletins are more likely to lead to despair. Wars are raging around the world with scant hopes for peaceful resolutions. The climate emergency is terrifying. In Britain, dreadful harms have been inf...
Location: Milton Keynes, UK
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Just Another Week!

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If you live to be eighty, you will have survived for about four thousand weeks. Which doesn’t really sound very much, although as Harold Wilson said, ‘A week is a long time in politics.’  It can also be a long time in women’s lives. The week of 19-26 July 2024 has included Joe Biden stepping down as a candidate for the US elections, a full week of business for the new British government, and several important and disturbing reports. As the week ended the Paris Olympics began, and another eventful week is now unfolding. If we unpick some events in a little more detail, we might conclude that it has been a bit of an emotional journey for women, offering hope, anger, joy, cynicism, excitement and despair, often all at the same time. Of course, many women may not have experienced any of those emotions – or even noticed some of these events. But the sensitive antennae of the members of Milton Keynes Fawcett Group have been twitching energetically recently – you can find more about this ...
Location: Milton Keynes, UK
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'Someone Struggled For Your Right To Vote. Use It'

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  The struggle The few terse words above are from Susan B Antony (1820-1906), the American social reformer and women’s rights activist. She worked tirelessly, travelling miles, organising petitions, giving speeches, and promoting women’s suffrage. Her name may not be as familiar to us as those of the Pankhursts and Millicent Fawcett, but her words here are crisp and accurate. Women’s struggle for voting rights took years and years, with abuse, pain and hardship along the way. The fight for suffrage has been well documented, and it’s unusual to find anyone who has not heard about the suffragetttes. So one might think that a decision NOT to vote should be unthinkable. But millions of people who are eligible to vote in the GE on July 4th will not be putting pencil to ballot paper. People may decide not to vote because of apathy, disillusionment, anger or despair - all these may play a part, and there is much to be explored to understand the current sense of malaise that some people fe...
Location: Milton Keynes, UK
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