thinking

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.

Continue reading →

Thinking is dead

Remember this front page from The Sun last week?

“This is the pig’s ear Ed made of a helpless bacon sarnie. In 48 hours he could be doing this to Britain.”

What has a bacon sandwich – even a helpless one – to say about a politician’s competence to govern a country?

This cover story merely showed a flair for a clever turn of phrase, a picture that would normally be deleted by a discerning photographer and perhaps a lack of hand eye coordination.
This is not information, not news and a planet away from thinking.

This is vituperation. 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 →