It’s another fine, bright day in Saddleworth, crisp and cold but sunny. A definite improvement on grey and gloomy.
When we drove from here to Southport on Monday there was some kind of problem with the M60 or the M62 and my daughter’s SatNav took us on a strangely convoluted route into and around central Manchester. Some of the route I recognised from decades ago when I would drive Phil to chess matches and he would work,out a traffic-beating shortcut using the Manchester A-Z map book. Much of his old navigation has been knocked into touch by the development of the Metrolink tram line and the building of places like the Etihad stadium and the velodrome.
It took us the better part of an hour to reach the point where we circumnavigated the city centre. That’s rush hour traffic for you! And suddenly we found ourselves on the edge of the high rise development near Castlefield, part of the new Manchester skyline, which I find quite ugly. The beautiful old bits of Manchester are being dwarfed by glass and metal tower blocks.
I remember the first of these being bullt, the Hilton Tower, back in 2006, described by the Financial Times as "the UK's first proper skyscraper outside London". From 2006 to 2018, the skyscraper was the tallest building in Manchester and outside London in the UK. In November 2018, it was surpassed by the South Tower at Deansgate Square. And now it’s just one of an increasing number of shiny giants!
When it was first built, its very top section would hum or whistle in the wind, sounding uncannily like some kind of warning siren,scaring the wits out of me one early evening as I walked to an Italian class.
And today I read this article about the lates Norman Foster addition to the New York skyline. I wonder how future generations will look at these constructions. Will they be considered monstrosities? Or things of vintage beauty?
In the news yesterday it was announced that the Girl Guides will no longer accept trans girls into their organisation: “Trans girls and young women, and others not recorded female at birth, will no longer be able to join Girlguiding as new young members”.
I was rather surprised. I’d always thought of Girl Guides as a tolerant, accepting organisation, asserting girls’ / women’s rights to do things just as well as the boys and men in the Boy Scouts. Of course, the decision has rather been forced upon them. A statement from the organisation’s chair of trustees, Denise Wilson, chief executive, Felicity Oswald, and chief guide, Tracy Foster, said: “Following April’s supreme court ruling relating to sex and gender, many organisations across the country have been facing complex decisions about what it means for girls and women and for the wider communities affected.
“Following detailed considerations, expert legal advice and input from senior members, young members and Girlguiding’s council, the board of trustees for Girlguiding has reached the difficult decision that, going forward, membership of Girlguiding will be restricted to girls and young women, as defined in the Equality Act.”
I was a Girl Guide, albeit very briefly. I had thoroughly enjoyed being a Brownie, where I was a “sixer”, leader of the Pixies subgroup, making sure my little troupe had cleaned their shoes and polished their badges ready for inspection, and joining in all the various games and activities. In due course I “flew up”, making my way up a “ladder” which consisted of the other Brownies. I promised to “do my best, to do my duty to God and the queen” and learnt the facts of life at a Girl Guide camp, one pf the older girls giving us chapter and verse about how babies were made. To my 11 year old self it seemed a rather unlikely and inconvenient system. The following year I had changed schools to a girls’ grammar school, with lots of homework. Coincidentally we acquired a television set at home and a new and exciting science fiction series, “A for Andromeda”, clashed with the time I usually went to Guides. Using homework as an excuse, I said farewell to Guiding.
Today comes the news that the venerable organisation The Women’s Institute has also had its arm twisted and is banning transwomen from joining them as new members. And once again the High Court Ruling, and possibly some small group pressure from within, that has influenced that decision.
Melissa Green, the chief executive of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes, said, “My hope is that the message that the transgender community gets from this is not one of betrayal, but is one of our desire to continue to maintain those friendships and that support. This has been a very difficult year for everybody, particularly for the transgender community, but I hope that when that anger subsides the transgender community will know that we stand with them.”
“As an organisation that has proudly welcomed transgender women into our membership for more than 40 years, this is not something we would do unless we felt that we had no other choice.”
The Women’s Institute has been around for a long time. Wikipedia tells me:
“The WI movement began at Stoney Creek, Ontario, Canada, in 1897 when Adelaide Hoodless addressed a meeting for the wives of members of the Farmers' Institute. WIs quickly spread throughout Ontario and Canada, with 130 branches launched by 1905 in Ontario alone, and the groups flourish in their home province today. As of 2013, the Federated Women's Institutes of Ontario (FWIO) had more than 300 branches with more than 4,500 members.”
“The organization had two aims: to revitalise rural communities and to encourage women to become more involved in producing food during the First World War.”
“At the end of World War I, the British Board of Agriculture withdrew its sponsorship, but the Development Commission financially supported the work of the forming of new WIs and gave core funding to the National Federation until it could become financially independent. In 1925, Polie Hirst Simpson was appointed the WI's first national agricultural adviser, and by 1926, the Women's Institutes were fully independent and rapidly became a prominent part of rural life.
One of their features was an independence from political parties or institutions, or church or chapel, which encouraged activism by non-establishment women, which helps to explain why the WI has been extremely reluctant to support anything that can be construed as war work, despite their wartime formation. During the Second World War, they limited their contribution to such activities as looking after evacuees, and running the Government-sponsored Preservation Centres where volunteers canned or made jam of excess produce; all this produce was sent to depots to be added to the rations.”
There you go, all rather different from Influencers and Mumsnet.
Here’s a photo of the Women's Institute building in Llanfairpwll, Wales.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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