The Paula Principle

Jude Kelly

WoW report

I went last week to one day at the 2018 WoW Festival on the South Bank.  WoW is now in its sixth or seventh year.  I’d been once or twice before and always learnt a lot and been invigorated by the sheer energy of the festival, so it was a pleasant surprise to learn that it is now in effect a global franchise, with equivalents happening all over the world – a real tribute to Jude Kelly its originator. The first session I attended had several speakers, all of whom were in their own ways inspirational – a paradoxically tired term, but one that in this case applies accurately.  I’ll pick…
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Plumbing, quotas, piloting

  I've just  spent most of the day at the Women of the World festival at the Southbank Centre.  It started with Jude Kelly interviewing Annie Lennox (yes!!), with scrolling stats on the global position of women;  the most startling of these is that gender-based violence notches up more deaths and disablement than wars, malaria, cancer and crashes.   It's worth also remembering that 41 million girls don't even get primary education.   Kirsty Wark then chaired a discussion on whether things had gone backwards as far as (violent) misogyny is concerned; it led me to her film on Blurred Lines, which deals with the fissile and contentious boundaries between…
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WoW report

I went last week to one day at the 2018 WoW Festival on the South Bank.  WoW is now in its sixth or seventh year.  I’d been once or twice before and always learnt a lot and been invigorated by the sheer energy of the festival, so it was a pleasant surprise to learn that it is now in effect a global franchise, with equivalents happening all over the world – a real tribute to Jude Kelly its originator. The first session I attended had several speakers, all of whom were in their own ways inspirational – a paradoxically tired term, but one that in this case applies accurately.  I’ll pick…
Read More

Plumbing, quotas, piloting

  I've just  spent most of the day at the Women of the World festival at the Southbank Centre.  It started with Jude Kelly interviewing Annie Lennox (yes!!), with scrolling stats on the global position of women;  the most startling of these is that gender-based violence notches up more deaths and disablement than wars, malaria, cancer and crashes.   It's worth also remembering that 41 million girls don't even get primary education.   Kirsty Wark then chaired a discussion on whether things had gone backwards as far as (violent) misogyny is concerned; it led me to her film on Blurred Lines, which deals with the fissile and contentious boundaries between…
Read More