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Earlier today, I read a post on Jennie Rigg’s Dreamwidth blog about women bloggers. That post itself comes about because of a discussion that began in LDV’s fringe meeting about e-engagement at the Bournemouth conference – and LDV still have an audio recording of that meeting if you’d like to listen. I’m responding to Jennie’s post because she calls out LDV editors on our unconscious (?) misogyny – but I’m responding in a personal capacity, hence these words being here and not over on’t Voice.
I like to think I’m a feminist, and in the Lib Dems, I strongly support the approach we are taking to increase our female representation (ie support, training and encouragement, rather than all-women shortlists. I remember listening to the debate we had at conference, and can keenly remember one woman speaker telling Baroness Williams she was plain wrong – “I want to be woman MP who’s got here on my own strengths, not been elected to parliament as a result of special pleading.”) Even so, I felt a little odd during our fringe meeting to specifically ask for women questioners when almost all of the audience members up to then had been men. Was that a good thing to do or was it tokenism?
Jennie specifically addresses herself to the LDV early morning post, which has two links to Lib Dem blogs. Her thesis is that more of us on the team are men than women, and when we’re selecting our links, we link to more men’s writing than women’s writing. We end up with a self-perpetuating unhelpful spiral that excludes women writers.
I went back and checked the choices I made myself in the posts I’ve written for Davily (eh? fingers. I mean Daily View) since we restarted after the summer break. My reckoning is that my links have been 14 men and 5 women, with one unknown. Unknown to me that is – I don’t know whether Nader Fekri is a man or a woman.
That’s not particularly good, but [fx struggling to find positive gloss] it’s better than the gender balance of the LibDemBlogs list from which we make our selections.
The whole point of DV2x2 was to help spread some of LDV’s awesome power to pull in readers out into the wider Lib Dem blogging community. (NB, if you’ve been linked by DV, do you have any stats on the sort of readership boost it provides?)
But, not to sound like a whiney whinger here, DV is a pain to write. Half the time I don’t know what day of the week it is, and I forget to make my contribution, which means I’m rushing to do it when I’m barely awake or half asleep.
And this is now the third criticism I’ve received for our selections for the second half. Those criticisms are a) you only/disproportionately link to “celebrity” Lib Dem bloggers b) you only link to “essay bloggers” not shorter posts and now c) you don’t link to enough women.
All of which is quite a lot to keep in your head when half awake, and in any case, only have two slots to fill! I will nevertheless endeavour to do so.
One other thing we can do to help: one of our thoughts behind 2×2 was to encourage people to use the comments to link to their own selections of the best writing that they’d like to share with people. I’ve amended our 2×2 template to remind us all to specifically ask for these contributions.
Finally on the issue of keeping a reading list – absolutely. I do use a feed reader (Google Reader) and it’s chock full of people I follow. It also has 2,000 unread posts… I couldn’t comment on the gender balance of the blogs in it, but I’d guess that Jennie is right and I read far more men’s writing than women’s.
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At the Tory conference, a few acres of of newsprint were dedicated to what the Tory leader’s wife wore. Apparently, it was a £65 dress from M&S, which she paired with some £29 shoes from Zara.
Goodness me. Who cares? I mean, you expect people in the public eye in receipt of a pretty decent wage to be turned out nicely. And on occasions such as this where you know people will be taking pictures and you can be pretty certain your photo will show up in prominent places in national newspapers, it’s entirely acceptable to make sure you’re wearing something nice. It’s also fine, I would put to you, for people in this situation to spend a reasonable amount of money on clothes. Mrs Cameron was being set up to contrast with Mrs Brown, who’d spent rather more on her togs. If both women looked nice, and neither was dripping with jewels, I don’t really care how much either woman spent on her frock.
Ultimately, it’s pretty unimportant – almost as unimportant, I’d say as that thorny issue of how long people clap for at conferences. But for some reason, the national newspapers think it matters that DC got a few more minutes and a few more standing ovations than GB, despite the fact that they are wholly different audiences and no-one but no-one in the country cares whether Labour loyalists are loyaller than Tory loyalists.
Then today I read something even more daft in the Mirror.
Apparently the process by which Mrs Cameron obtained her £65 dress didn’t go quite the way you’d think. I’d imagined, foolishly, that Mrs Cameron went into a shop, looked at a few dresses on their hangers on the shop floor, tried a few on until she found one that flattered her, then took it to the cash desk and paid for it.
If the Mirror is to be believed, what actually happened is that Mrs Cameron wanted to wear a particularly rare M&S dress, as modelled on the television by Myleene Klass (who she?). In order to find it, her people spoke to M&S’s people, who issued an order to every M&S in the country to find precisely the one dress. This entailed dozens of staff across the nation in including M&S’s beknighted CX in the pursuit of one dress. When that proved impossible, they found a dress that didn’t fit, and paid a dressmaker conceivably more than the dress cost to make it fit.
Was this all done in a vapid game of oneupmanship between two camps, using women’s dresses as a skirmish in class warfare? If so, what a horribly pointless waste of human endeavour, and what a sad indictment of the state of political discourse in our country.
Here’s a little something that found its way into my inbox in recent days.
During conference season, a friend of mine heard something in the tone of the Leader of the Conservatives that reminded him of the leader of… something else entirely. The rising inflection. The increasingly manic tone. The stilted rhetoric and the faux outrage.
I think there are questions to be answered.
Is David Cameron secretly Davros?
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As I wrote a few weeks ago, I’m struggling to be bothered to cook much at the moment.
As a way of tackling that, I thought I’d write up some of the recipes of the things I do like to cook.
2×2 Lasagne is a meal plan for two people over two days. Lasagne is a total faff to cook, and mucks up pretty much every pan in the kitchen. If you’re cooking for only two, it seems barely worth the effort But spread out over two days, it’s much more manageable. The secret is to do two mince based dishes, only one of which is actually lasagne. Then, the second day, you don’t have much more to do than to preheat the oven and make a cheese sauce.
This isn’t really fast food. Mince benefits from long slow cooking – and will taste even better the following night from having spent a day resting.
One final point – I make no claim to authenticity with this. I don’t know how real Italians make lasagne, and the one time we visited Italy, we didn’t eat much pasta. My mince is no substitute for a real ragù.
Day 1 – the mince
1lb beef mince
1 large onion
1 clove garlic (or more if you and your +1 like it, and aren’t susceptible to heartburn)
1 carrot
1 can tomatoes
handful mushrooms
Tomato purée
Bacon
Oxo cube
herbs to taste
glass good red wine
red wine vinegar
Dice the onion and carrot together and soften in olive oil in a large saucepan with the optional finly sliced bacon.
When the onion is transparent, add the finely chopped garlic and the mince, and cook until the mince is completely grey and nasty with no red bits left. (Mince goes through a horrid phase when you cook it but recovers when you flavour it and cook it.)
If you are being health conscious you could drain the fat off at this stage.
When the mince is fully cooked, add the tin of tomatoes and reserve the tin.
Make up the oxo cube to halfway up the tin and add the herbs and a generous helping of tomato purée. (The tom puree is absolutely essential to the recipe. Tomato sauce is no substitute. The oxo cube also adds tasty tasty MSG) Stir well. Add the red wine to the tin to fill it up and pour over the mince and veggies.
The pan should now be a little too wet. Finely slice the mushrooms (I usually run them through the slice side of a box grater) into the mix, stir well, bring to the boil and reduce the heat.
Simmer for ages. Stir regularly. At least 40 minutes, better an hour. You should end up with a tasty sauce with not too much spare liquid. Use the time to clean the kitchen. Never leave a pan on the stove unattended as unattended cooking pots are a major source of house fires – the single biggest source for non-smoking households.
Reserve half of the mince for tomorrow, the lasagne phase. Cover it and let it cool it quickly to room temperature and put it in the fridge.
The first night, you could use half the mince on its own with rice, with chillis and kidney beans as chilli con carne, in cottage pie, with spaghetti as spag bol or spooned over a baked potato.
Day 2 – the main attraction
So, come night two, you are ready to make the lasagne. You already have your ersatz-ragù, so all you have to do is make a cheese sauce, layer it in a suitable oven dish with sheet pasta, and bake it until it’s brown and lovely.
Cheese sauce
Half a pint milk
Half an onion
bay leaf
cloves
black peppercorns
butter
dessert spoon of flour
Cheese – strong cheddar. No, more cheese than that. Add in some parmesan too.
half a spoon of mustard
Even more cheese to top lasagne
Take the peeled half onion and stud it with the cloves. Put the studded onion with the bay leaf, peppercorns and milk in a pan and bring to the boil. Once at the boil, turn off the heat and allow to steep for a good few minutes, then discard all but the milk. The extra ingredients give a real savoury depth of flavour to the milk.
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees.
In another pan, melt the butter and sprinkle over the flour. Mix well. Add the milk a little at a time, whisking vigorously all the time to guard against lumps. This is a basic white sauce – add a pile of breadcrumbs to make bread sauce, or in our case, add the cheese and mustard to make full flavoured cheese sauce. Continue to whisk.
To make the lasagne, spoon yesterday’s mince into the bottom of an oven proof rectangular dish of just the right size. Add a layer of ready lasagne sheets, and a little of the cheese sauce. Continue in layers until you have run out of ingredients and the dish is full (this is how you know whether the dish is the right size or not. Practice makes perfect.) Make sure you finish with a cheese sauce layer, and that the cheese sauce is all you can see when you’re done – no pasta or meat sauce poking out of the edges. You need a good seal all around the edge or the pasta will not cook. Sprinkle more grated cheese – a mix of parmesan and cheddar – on top.
Bake in the oven until the sauce is piping hot and the cheese topping has nicely browned. A good few minutes ought to do it.
Serve.
Eat.
Get minion to wash up.
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