Occasionally, I like to depart from the strictly political and venture into other arenas.
I spend a lot of time these days travelling between Yorkshire and London and to speed up last week's journey I read Are You Somebody? a marvellous memoir by journalist Nuala O'Faolain, who died earlier this year. It's a must-read for any woman brought up as I was in the strictures of Roman Catholicism and I heartily recommend it for its honesty and poignancy.
Indeed, I was so taken with the book I was Googling around the internet to find that O'Faolain's former partner, the Republican feminist and journalist Nell McCafferty, is currently kicking up a storm in Ireland over a nude portrait published in a major art exhibition. Why? Well, she looks , to use her own terminology, utterly fucked. No airbrushing , overweight, and.....to put it bluntly.....old.
Society demands that women try and turn back time. We rarely see images of older women as they really are .
Perhaps because these are images no-one really wants to see. We all cling to the illusion that youth is forever and that we will all somehow manage to look like Helen Mirren does in her early sixties. Chances are that we won't.
Anyway, because I was so moved by the O-Faolain memoir, and because I get so fed-up of older women being written off, I'll seek out her memoir too as she is obviously a brave and feisty woman. As they say in Ireland, fair play to you, Nell.
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