Mme. Roux Fills In

You’ll have to excuse Alan today, he’s had a double hit of strangeness and gone for a bit of a lie down. I met up with him in the park where today being fine, then by the lake it was a fundraiser for mountains and brownies, and judging by the stalls – ice-cream. And whilst mostly composed of fit middle-age men in smashing sunglasses and small girls with skinned knees climbing very tall things, it also had a core of young women alternately sneering and simpering. The first towards anyone not a local lad, the second... well, you get the idea.

Now Alan’s a chap who whilst not quite the adventuring sort I knew of old is still one for whom there are a few simple values. And so when passing by he heard these teetering young things snap, ‘What am I, a fuckin’ feminist?’ he was brought near dead in his tracks. He would ordinarily have thought, well I hope so. And whilst not everyone can be the sort of rally-driving, balloonist, critic, explorer and all-round good egg such as I, he does sort of expect that, yes, a woman would not consider 'feminist' to be an insult. And yet there it was. So whilst I railed on at them about the women’s movement, about fighting the lazy beliefs of idiots, and about – yes – how they now had the right to be a twat, not because they were women, but because they were twats, the world crumbled for him that little but about the edges.

Now poor Alan has obviously had a sheltered life. The women he knows aren’t strong through declaration; they just are, because they’re people. He’s not been exposed to simpering fools that play the little chattel, and play up to men who want the little chattel. So like I say, he’s gone for a bit of a lie down and the determination that his daughters will undergo a strenuous programme of not-taking-shit, nor pandering-to-hoped-for-forgotten-stereotypes.

They of coure called me a feminist, which I am. So I set fire to their stupid pink car.