Think Slam

Dr Elsie Inglis by Lady Francis Balfour

I bet a man wins this

For International Women’s Day 2025, I was lucky enough to be judged the winner of a poetry competition.

It happened over a week – I entered the end of one week under my pen name, Bassi Meri, was told I had won it by Thursday and then read it to an audience on Saturday.

It took 10 minutes to write it.

Nope, I did not just rush it off because the deadline loomed. It sort of burst out, fully formed. Why? Because, although it was International Women’s Day, it was not open exclusively to women, and that the theme was about women who inspired, or the experience of women today.

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Public benefit services should only to be run as not-for-profit

This was the second piece performed in the Swindon Festival of Literature Think Slam, 2014.

At the Think Slam two years ago, someone gave an interesting three minuter about how the welfare state should not be run by social enterprise.

I’m here to say that it should and so should other public benefit services.

In the last two years we’ve seen the NHS been virtually put up for sale and bought by the French. Schools have been run by businesses.

Public transport either slashed to extinction or priced beyond the ordinary wage. Letting agencies charge extortionate prices to renters before they even move into accommodation. Continue reading →

Why we should tell five year olds about sex

A slightly abbreviated version of this was ‘performed’ at the Swindon Festival of Literature Think Slam 2014.

Modern society – especially our British and American societies – have a weird relationship with sex. Women who discreetly bare their breasts in public to feed an infant have been ostracised, as demonstrated by Holly McNish’s experience-inspired poem ‘Embarrassed’. Whereas page three of The Sun bearing young women’s breasts for sexual pleasure continues unabated. And news reports of pedophilia are run next to stories of female celebrities who have just turned sixteen and therefore suddenly sexually available. Continue reading →