International Women's and Pancake Day

I have always loved pancake day, although I don't love it so much when I have to make the pancakes, and even less when I can't just pop down the Co-op and buy a big stack of ready-to-heat ones for a couple of bob. Oh alright then, a couple of quid.
I have of course, consulted Delia. I have done everything she has told me. It's not that I've never made them before, just that I only do it once a year as a general rule.

In the garden, things don't seem to be anywhere near as growy here as back in England. There, daffodils and violets abound, here, bulbs are pushing scared greenery through the soil.

The jetlag is in play. I fell asleep last night, sitting on the sofa watching telly, and well before nine o'clock. This morning however, I wasn't wide awake until around half past five, it had been three the previous night.

So, International Women's Day. Well played Dame Judi Dench (genuflect) and Daniel Craig, for using their roles in the James Bond films, for good.

From the Feministing website, I shamelessly repost the link to the Jane Austen drinking game, one drink for, 'Conceited Independence' and another for 'Small Dog'. Sadly, at my womanly time of life, that's about all I can manage. I'd love to be able to get as far as the 'chug' section, and I daren't enter the 'Womanly Skills' part, for fear of being the last to raise my little finger whilst holding the glass.

On the theme of the moment, how Feminism makes life better for men, writer Taylor, on Gender Focus, takes the so-called author of the so-called humorous, and completely blank book, 'What Men Think About Apart From Sex', quite firmly to task for portraying men as just that shallow and feckless.

Penultimately, 'The Rise of 'Enlightened Sexism' ' by Susan Douglas who quite rightly burns the part of the establishment who try to get us to buy into the 'you can have it all and you have arrived' myth.

And finally, although I have already written about it, the DVD of 'Made in Dagenham' isn't out until the 28th March, but however you do it, see it, it is beyond brilliant. My favourite speech by Miranda Richardson as Barbara Castle, in response to her lackeys trying to dissuade her from meeting the machinists, on the grounds that it would give their cause credence, goes thusly,'

"Credence? I will give credence to their cause. My god! Their cause already has credence. It is equal pay. Equal pay is common justice, and if you two weren't such a pair of egotistical, chauvinistic, bigoted dunderheads, you would realise that. Oh, my office is run by incompetents and I am sick of being patronised, spoken down to, and generally treated as if I was the May Queen. Set up the meeting! "