Lunar activity, possibly lunatic behaviour and strong women!

Some people I know are getting very excited about the moon this evening. Posts like this one are appearing:
 “Ready for a shake up with the beautiful Full moon, Supermoon, Blue moon, Total eclipse. Visible from 5pm, best view 12.40am weather permitting!”

 Here’s a link to some information about it. I am not getting too excited about it, because whenever they announce that there will be a supermoon, a meteorite shower, aurora borealis or ufos visible in the sky of the Northwest of England, well, you can guarantee that around here it will be too cloudy to see anything at all.

So there it is!

It is, however, possible that the moon is having an effect on me despite my scepticism about ever seeing its interesting qualities in our night sky. According to my diary I should have been having lunch with an old friend in Manchester today. I got up bright and early, at my daughter’s request,  to escort one of the grandchildren to the doctor’s surgery, and went on from there to Manchester city centre.

I did a bit of window-shopping and a bit of inside-the-store-shopping and took myself off in plenty of time to meet my friend at the appointed time in Waterstone’s cafe. I ordered a coffee and placed myself strategically so that I could spot her as she came in.

The appointed time came ... and went .... and my friend failed to show. This is most unlike her so I checked my diary. It clearly said January 31st. Eventually, to be on the safe side, I checked my emails. There it was, in the email trail: some discussion of Wednesday 31st January but an eventual decision to go for Wednesday 14th February, since neither if us expects to be whisked away for a romantic Valentine’s Day shindig!

Either I am going completely doo-lally or the moon, as I already suggested, is messing with my head. But I had a little wander around the centre, watched the weather go from windy rain to windy sun to windy hail and then cycle around again and again, and then caught the tram and bus back home. 

Further to my post from the other day all about my love-hate relationship with technology, here is a link to Michele Hanson writing about the same topic. I have long admired Michel Hanson, ever since I came across her column. “Treasure”, in the 1990s. That column recounted the trials and tribulations of life with a teenage daughter, so similar to my own experience that it made me see the funny side of everything.

And here is a link to the Guardian’s “Long Read” for this week, all about Mary Beard, historian, academic, TV personality - but never in reality or quiz shows - and feminist unafraid to buck the trend and prepared to say that, far from accepting abuse as “the norm back in the day”, she simply did not consider herself abused as a young woman:-

 “As an undergraduate, she “went out and got pissed – sex, drugs, rock’n’roll and all that. But I worked really, really hard. I am not of the view that people get firsts effortlessly.” These were different times. She found herself drawn to older, sometimes married, men. “I had relationships with people who were technically in different levels, in positions of power,” she said, “and I am fucking well not having my agency removed from that. You could say: ‘Beard, you are engaged in massive self-deception, you were being exploited within a power structure and you’ve just not seen it.’ But when I look back at the late 1970s and early 80s, that’s not how my relationships with these guys felt. You can accuse me of, and I can never defend myself against, mammoth miscognition.”
She doesn’t feel damaged by scenarios that would plainly be unacceptable today, she said, though “on the other hand you’d have to be blind as a bat to see it didn’t work like that for everybody”. One of the great problems of today, she said, was deciding how far current rules of behaviour could be projected back on the past. This question also informs her academic work: she is more likely to point out how different we are from the Romans than how similar. “As soon as you say things were different 40 years ago, people start to say you’re a harassment denier. But actually, they were. I do not think that the lives of women of my generation as a class were blighted by the way the power differentials between men and women operated. We wanted to change those power differentials; we also had a good time.””

Good for Mary Beard