Mum and Daughter Day

The family. The only one I don't recognise is me.

Today was designated as our mother and daughter day. Alex and I went to Havana for lunch, spent too much money at Ten Thousand Villages next door but one, and then trawled Ikea. All of which was greatly enjoyable.
I don't wish to diss the good work of Ten Thousand Villages at all, but I felt there was some kind of irony to their statement that 80% of the world's poverty is suffered by women, so 70% of the goods they sell is made by women.
Hmmm.
The problem is that we already know that 80% of the world's work is done by women, so it would seem to me that the way to equalise the situation is to get men to do some of the work and then pay the women for it.

Late in the afternoon, when we had returned to the homestead, Mormons came to the front door. They proved to be inadequate sport.
Austen amused himself with them to start with, but then I thought,
'They've bloody well knocked on my front door, why shouldn't I get to be unpleasant to them? Alack and alas, I was not on form, and they turned out to be simply wooden robots with painted smiles.
'What is your church doing to combat misogyny and homophobia?' I asked. They looked confused. They asked what misogyny meant.
'Oh, we love women,' they said, 'women have a sacred task, to bear children.'
They probably wished they hadn't said that.
Then I moved on to homophobia. They didn't know what that meant either. Seriously, their brows wrinkled and after a few seconds said that they thought it meant homosexuality.
Having explained what homophobia was, I asked again what their church was doing to combat it.
They side-stepped the question, but assured me that they loved homosexuals (?!) but not the sin of homosexuality.
They probably wished they hadn't said that either.
I asked them if they thought Jesus considered homosexuality to be a sin.
Yes, they did think that.
I told them that the Jesus we knew from the Bible considered everyone to be equal.
'Ah...,'they said, 'but he did keep company with sinners,'
I asked them whether Jesus considered Gentiles to be sinners. Guess what? They had no idea what Gentiles meant.
I assured them that homophobia and misogyny were the sins, and hoped that they would meet the real Jesus at some point, but honestly, I felt that the whole thing had been pointless and that I had wasted ten minutes I'd never get back. I felt I should have had better sport with bigots who knocked at my door unsolicited, especially ones who dress in three-piece suits.

Last night, or maybe the night before, I dreamt I was preparing for a visit to my place of work, by Angela Merkel. Everything was ready, but the place was dirty, and however much I cleaned, the place stayed dirty. I'm sure there must be some significance.

In the Guardian, there is an excellent article by Tanya Gold, on how appallingly Harriet Harmon MP has been treated by the media over the past week. And true to form, the majority of comments are by complete trolls, many of the remarks being, wait for it, yes, misogynistic.