Strong Female Characters

I have a six-minute slot for a 'lightning talk' at this weekend's International Women's Day Festival in Hanley, and am torn between a shortened extract from an earlier tale and this snippet, in which we eavesdrop on some of my favourite imaginary friends discussing 'strong female characters'. Between novels, I tend to let my characters adjourn to an imaginary pub but it’s rather early in the day for that, so you might like to picture them in a café setting instead...

  ‘It’s really rather inspirational to be surrounded by so many strong female characters,’ declared Hilary Carrington proudly, surveying the unlikely sisterhood gathering around her. ‘We’ve known each other for almost four and a half years – counting from when our author started writing us.'
  'In real time it's well over forty,' said Lyn Walker, propping her crutches against a spare chair and easing herself slowly into her seat. 
  'Is it as long as that?' Hilary's tone suggested she wished to believe not. 
  'Oh yes, luvvie,' Lyn confirmed cheerfully. 'Me and Terry were going steady during that really hot summer and you and I started at the same school long before that!'
  'And it's over thirty years since we left University,' Daphne Randall reminded her, with a shocking lack of sisterly solidarity, pulling off her knitted hat to reveal a neat bob of purple hair. ‘But we're hardly your typical strong female characters, are we?'
  'Not in the killing aliens with flame-throwers sense,' noted Sally Archer, shooting a long arm right across the table for the teapot and knocking over the dainty vase of daffodils. Lyn stood it back up and mopped the table with a paper tissue, as she might after one of her grandchildren.
  'I fancy you'd be the one to do that, if you didn't set the whole spaceship ablaze in the process!' laughed Daphne. 'But what I'm on about is how strong female character usually just means one who starts the story hating some bloke's guts and spends the rest of it falling in love with him!’ 
  ‘Whereas you would never do anything like that!' Hilary raised her elegantly arched eyebrows.
  Daphne shrugged. 'At least little our little chats always pass the Bechdel Test.'
  'What's that?' asked Sally. 'Is it like a Turing Test for characters, to see if readers see us as real people?'
  'It's a feminist way to assess films,' Hilary explained. 'To pass, there must be a scene where two named female characters have a conversation with each other about something other than a man. Alien is often cited as an example, as Ripley and the other woman...
  'Lambert...' said Sally. 'She was the navigator.'
  'Indeed,' replied Hilary, who hadn't actually dared watch it since cowering with her college friends in a long-demolished cinema. 'And they talk to each other about the alien.'
  'The alien's a male, though. Like a drone insect. There are queen aliens in the later films, and...'
  'It still counts,' Daphne interrupted. 'He’s a monster, not a fella. And the Bechdel test remains relevant. Think about all the female characters who still don't get lines and don't get names, they just get...'
  'I know,' said Sally. 'Whereas with you and Hilary, if there is any sex, it's because you started it!'
  'You can talk, pet!' 
  'Absolutely!' Hilary agreed. 'Which reminds me, what happened on Monday?'
  Sally grinned and turned pink. 'He said "yes!"'
  'Oh how lovely!' Hilary threw her arms around Sally's broad shoulders.
  'Bechdel Test failure alert!' sighed Daphne.
  'I'm still not clear how it works,' said Sally. 'You and Hilary are always talking about men. George Osborne, Iain Duncan Smith, Tony Blair..., though I suppose Daphne's get-out about the alien covers that.'
  'How's that then, luvvie?' asked Lyn.
  'It's irrelevant that they're male – it’s their risk to humanity that matters, which makes Margaret Thatcher the alien queen!'
  'Mind your language, pet!'
  'I've never really bothered with feminist politics,' Sally said. 'Men act differently towards you when you're one-point-eight-five metres tall. They don't open doors for you - they teach you to hang doors. They don't throw their cloaks over puddles for you - they get you to fetch a bag of gravel to fill in the hole. Dad and the lads have always treated me like one of them - they call me an honorary bloke!'
  'That's all very well,' said Hilary. 'But what would the lads say if you called one of them an honorary lass?'
  'It would depend who I said it to but the second word would be "off"!'
  'Exactly!' said Daphne. ‘They see your strength as a male trait, but wouldn’t accept any of their strengths as female ones.’
  Sally looked a little crestfallen.
  'I'm sure Sally is literally the strongest of all us!' said Lyn, in an effort to cheer her up.
  'I might not be.  Daphne's worked her boat through hundreds of locks so she might beat me at arm-wrestling!'
  'Let's see about that, shall we?'
  After a closely-fought challenge, Lyn mopped the table again and straightened the stems of the bruised daffodil blooms as she stood them back in their little vase.
  'It's not about physical strength, really,' a victorious Sally said magnanimously. 'Hilary couldn't arm-wrestle either of us but she's been fighting for her clients for almost twenty-eight years.  I think she's brilliant - for her age!'
  'Thank you, Sally.'
  'We haven't had to balance our careers with raising kiddies, mind,' said Daphne. ‘Unlike Tricia, who's a mum and carer as well as an adviser, or Lyn's daughter-in-law Paula, mixing parenthood and politics. They've had to be both strong and organised!'
  'Talking about being organised,' Lyn said hastily. 'I've really got to go now. I've got a tribunal now and my taxi's waiting!'
  'Is Hilary representing you again, Lyn or one of the others from the Project?' asked Sally.
  'Neither of them, luvvie.  I'm not the one appealing, this time.  I'm representing a young lady with a PIP appeal.'
  The others watched as Lyn hoisted herself out of her seat, accepting Hilary's help with her crutches before picking her way between tables and chairs and out of the door.
  'She wins!' said Sally. 

Severe Discomfort, staring Hilary, Lyn and Sally, is free to download every first and fifth Friday of the month.

Grand Union, staring Daphne Randall, is free at random times, including today (5th March 2016) and International Women's Day on 8th March 2016.

Paperbacks can be ethically sourced from CompletelyNovel

Telling Stories

#OweninResidence at Staffs Uni

If you can't help chuckling at the meme that juxtaposes a photo of Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Jones with one of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker, yet still find it genuinely comforting that these two are on the side of the Rebel Alliance, you would have enjoyed last week's lecture on 'The Politics of Hope' (or was that 'A New Hope'?) at Staffordshire University, delivered by Owen Jones with his customary optimistic, self-deprecating eloquence.

One point he made that struck a particular chord was how we on 'the left' tend to fight our corner with facts, figures and statistics, while the Daily Mail et al make their case by telling stories - generally of the teenage single mum with eight kids gets £10,000 a week in benefits or illegal immigrant housed in £20 million castle variety.  I made those up, just to be clear about that.  You'll see why that's important later.

Owen's point about stories was that we should, in the best possible way, be less like the QI Elves and more like the Daily Mail, and tell more stories of our own.  He cited the example of the man sanctioned for not being 'available for work' because he was selling poppies for the British Legion, which arguably did much more to make the case against JSA sanctions than any set of stats.  There are plenty of others, about people sanctioned for attending job interviews which clashed with Jobcentre appointments or for having the temerity to be in hospital after a heart attack or RTA when they should have been on a Work Programme course. A DWP officer once insisted to me that 'we don't sanction people, they sanction themselves by their own behaviour.'  No quantity of stats can refute that claim.  A single good case study shoots it down in flames.

Stories are also damned difficult to counter without seeming to call your opponent, or their unimpeachable source, a liar.  Many years ago, a client at a project I worked for in Hampshire insisted that New Age Travellers got extra benefits for their dogs.  Not true, I laughed.  Is true, she insisted - her friend told her so, and her friend's daughter worked for Social Services. Similarly, a family friend recounted one day how a friend's son or daughter worked in a mobile phone shop and had to give out top-of-the-range mobiles to asylum-seekers after they refused to take basic models.  I knew full well that this was an urban myth straight out of the BNP book of bedtime stories, but there was no persuading our man - after all, why would his mate at the pub make something like this up?  More recently, I had a skirmish at a country park tea stall with a lady sat at the next table, who was telling her friends that smokers on benefits got extra money for their fags.  I politely introduced myself as a CAB benefits specialist and assured her this was not so, only to be told that her friend had seen it on her son's benefit letter.

In each case, although I had the facts at my fingertips, and my professional role to lend them credibility, it was difficult to deploy them without seeming rude.  I found myself making excuses for the 'friend' - they must have misunderstood what they had seen or heard - to allow the story teller to save face and not appear a gullible fool.  A 'counter-story' might be easier to deliver and at least as effective a tactic.  Instead of 'Excuse me, but that's wrong because...', an approach based on 'Really?  I'm surprised to hear that, because I know someone who...' might get a more sympathetic hearing and make the point just as well, only there is client confidentiality to consider, of course, and stripping out personal details can leave your own story sounding unconvincing.

On the subject of unconvincing details, I was stunned to see that almost 90% of tip-offs to the Benefit Fraud Hotline have proved baseless.  I would have guessed quite a high BS factor, but for more than 8 in 10 to be without justification is staggering.  Of course, this risks ending up as just another statistic bandied about by us leftie benefits geeks if we aren't careful.  What people need to make this sink in is a real-life version of Severe Discomfort.  Unless a real 'Lyn' or 'Terry' is brave enough to come forward to tell their story of what it's like to be an innocent person on the wrong end of a DWP investigation, to the neutral, it's all just numbers.

Hand-Up or Hand-Out?

The Antidote to Channel 5?

Channel 5, if we are to believe their version of events, are engaging in a 'bold social experiment', which we will be able to view next Tuesday evening.  Naturally, this being Channel 5, those being experimented upon are families in receipt of Social Security benefits - hence the edifying title 'The Great British Benefits Handout.'

I should be grateful, in a round-about sort of way, as it gives me an excuse to plug my stories about the benefit claimants the TV companies don't want to show you, who don't fit the stereotypes and don't draw the rantings and ratings.  Instead, it fills me with dread.  After perhaps a small amount of progress, with the Chancellor's defeat over Tax Credit cuts and broadly sympathetic coverage of the people who have lost their personal independence via PIP's impact on Motability, the debate about benefits looks set to become poisonous again.


Channel 5's PR department are already playing an ugly double game on this programme.  The Independent, obviously drawing from a press-release from C5, plays up the positives - the amount of specialist support the families had to manage their money, the programme-makers' alleged desire to see them succeed - although it can't resist adopting the usual language around 'escaping' from benefit dependency. 


The Mirror ran with an altogether more typical tabloid take on the story - of feckless poor people being reckless - and went on to fuel the controversy and boost the advance publicity with the equally typical families hit back at.... story yesterday.  It's media manipulation at its most cynical from all concerned - two versions of what the programme shows, carefully targeted to get both broadsheet and tabloid-reading audiences tuning in and fuelling the Twitterstorm even before the programme airs.


At risk of doing the Daily Maily thing of rushing to condemn before the programme has even aired, I am already deeply suspicious of what is going on here.  For a start, if this was a serious social experiment, why would the families receive their money in a suitcase full of banknotes, rather than by direct debit into a bank or Post Office account?  Benefits no longer arrive as giro cheques to cash at the Post Office anymore, they have been paid into claimants' accounts for years (making me suspicious of the authenticity of references to 'giros' these days).  It's clearly for the cameras, particularly that most exploitative image, which shames the Daily Mirror article, of the little boy with his arms overflowing with wads of notes.


And why £26,000?  That wouldn't be to reinforce the myth that that's what every family on benefits gets, would it?  Ever since that became the 'Benefit Cap', the idea has pervaded popular culture that all claimants get this much in 'handouts'.  Trust Channel 5 to be the ones to let us all see what it looks like in lovely, fluttery notes - just in case all you hard-working viewers weren't feeling jealous enough already!

If I honestly thought this might come close to being a serious examination of the possible impact of a 'citizens' income', I would put up with the usual sarcastic voice-over and mocking music.  But, to be such a thing, it wouldn't only give suitcases of money to benefit claimants.  It would see what a low-waged, long working-hours family chose to do - whether they would live it up or use the funds to adjust their 'work-life balance' in favour of life.  It would give a stash of dosh to a few struggling artists, to see if it helped them through the creation of their masterpiece or allow them to finish that crucial first novel.  The 'social experiment' could take the money worries away from a carer or two, or from someone close to retirement struggling with a physically demanding job.  When you pick only benefit claimants - and, it seems, those with good entertainment value from what has been leaked of their business plans - you aren't experimenting, you're exploiting.

I wish more people would question the vicious class bias that runs through all of these 'reality TV shows'.  There was a trailer on Channel 4 yesterday for Britain's Weirdest Council Houses.  Am I alone in wondering why, when Social Housing tenants pimp their homes, what we see is 'weird', while private owners have Amazing Spaces - and the super-rich have Grand Designs?

Bad news for the 'Beverage Fund'?

CAB team face 'hungry gap'!

We've been food shopping this afternoon, including the monthly 'biscuit ration' for the workers at Hanley's CAB office, purchased with the profits from sales of 'welfare rights lit' and home-made jam.  As Amazon pay me 3 months in arrears and sales were pretty healthy through the autumn, the fact that I won't have fruit for jam-making until June or July shouldn't pose a threat.  However, sales of ebooks have been very low this month, though the trade in free downloads remains brisk.

This is good news - at least as far as the original 'cunning plan' is concerned.  'Welfare rights lit' is supposed to be a not-for-profit counter-propaganda exercise, using tax-dodging Amazon (with deliberate irony) to host the material and similarly suspect Facebook and Google to spread the word.

In addition to the usual 'freebie' days, there is an extra opportunity to get the first two stories, Severe Discomfort and Continual Supervision this Wednesday, which is the third anniversary of Discomfort's publication.  All I ask in return is a share with your friends (especially any who subscribe to the Channel 5 view of people who claim benefits, or anyone who co-ordinates a book club) and/or an honest review on Amazon, Goodreads or CompletelyNovel. 

If you live near a welfare rights project, law centre or CAB, and you can spare the funds, you could bring them biscuits.  After all, it's almost the end of the financial year and, if you've read any of the Solent Welfare Rights Project's stories, you know this means we're all tightening our belts!

Fracking About

On Sunday morning, part way through writing chapter 2 of a new '4mph thriller', I abandoned Daphne Randall in the suburbs of south Manchester and set off for Hanley and a demonstration against fracking.  It was a miserable, drizzly morning and I would have been happier to stay indoors with the laptop, hot toast and another cuppa, but there are times when the right thing to do is to stand up for what you believe in - and to stand in the rain for it at that.  It's certainly what Daphne herself would do, though Daphne would have stayed longer and gone to the pub afterwards. 

Fracking - the extraction of fuel gases or oil from underground by the 'hydraulic fracturing' of rocks, particularly certain shales - is being promoted by its supporters as a route to energy security as North Sea gas supplies decline, with the added advantage of easier access to these on-shore underground reserves.  It's also promoted as relatively 'clean', though in comparison to coal, which is hardly a ringing endorsement.  On the downside, it's still a fossil fuel.  There's a risk of contamination of the water table from the chemicals used to 'frack' the gas out of the rocks and the liquid used for this is itself then toxic waste requiring safe disposal.  One speaker at today's event raised the unpleasant possibility of some of that being shipped all the way from the USA to Middleport for specialist treatment. 

Middleport is a district of Stoke-on-Trent still in the throes of regeneration, most famous right now for its pottery, location for the Great Pottery Throwdown and a pet project of HRH The Prince of Wales.  It is less famous as the place where my fictional heroine first sees her future home, chugging along the Trent and Mersey Canal in a decidedly rusty state, in this short story. Either way, it seems a particularly unsuitable location into which large quantities of hazardous chemicals could be transported.  A heavily-populated urban residential area sitting alongside one of the country's major Inland Waterways - what could possibly go wrong?

The proximity of the Trent and Mersey Canal to a zone through the Potteries earmarked for coal-bed methane extraction set me thinking about the potential impact on the canal network more generally.  Around here, I would have thought anything that further destabilized land honeycombed by disused mineshafts was a spectacularly bad idea.  Friends of the Earth's map shows licences covering areas including large stretches of the T&M, the Leeds and Liverpool Canal and the Shroppie and Llangollen, as well as the Kennett & Avon further south.  I had a look for any public policy on fracking from the Canal and River Trust and the Inland Waterways Association but, disappointingly, there appears to be nothing from either body.  The Inland Waterways Association of Ireland appear to be a step ahead: this from 2012 -

 

"The threat of Fracking is causing the IWAI much concern; it is proving to be an a country wide issue.  The Government see it as a benefit to employment growth, together with the advantage of the development of a natural energy source, while the public see the harm and devastation that it has reputably caused in other parts of the world where this mining method has been used.  Paul Garland has been appointed as the “Fracking Liason Officer” for the Association, and will be responsible for developing a policy and designing a strategy to manage the IWAI’s interests."

- though there appears to be no sign of what happened next on the Internet!

So I appear to have some lobbying to do.  I also may have a good plot to work into a voyage across the Leeds and Liverpool Canal for our Daphne!

A Striking Similarity

Men at Work - Dad, plus 'Second Man', in the cab of an 'ED'

From my 'serious' blog, The Ragged-Skirted Philanthropist, which usually concerns itself with the details of Social Security policy, but occasionally branches out...
  
Until he retired, my father worked as a train driver.  A heart attack in about 1992 took him off the main line and into the 'depot' for the last few years of his employment, which had seen both the advent and the demise of British Rail.

Even before the heart attack, Dad's work had brought him into fairly regular contact with the NHS.  There were frequent trips to the old Southampton Eye Hospital in the early years of diesel propulsion, as the new locomotives chucked out tiny fragments of metal in their exhaust, which then required specialist removal if they got into your eyeball and rusted.  That the same machines made such an unholy racket now means regular fitting and tweaking of hearing aids and, on several occasions in the last few years, he's been back in the Coronary Care Unit - most recently for the fitting of his second Implantable Cardioverter Defibulator.

Dad's working life and that of the doctors who've kept repairing him have always had one thing in common - a necessity to work unsocial hours.  Recently, however, I've noticed another.

It was The Sun's stories about "Moet Medics" that triggered the deja vu moment.  Of course I hadn't seen them in the actual paper - I wouldn't so much as wipe my backside on that rag - but I had laughed at the Junior Doctors' clever Instagram/Facebook parodies mocking allegations that they led the high life on inflated salaries. One of the joys of Social Media is that you can instantly strike back against the media establishment if you are misrepresented.  In 1982, that wasn't so easy.

I mention 1982, because that was the year that Dad and his colleagues got the "Moet Medics" treatment from The Sun.  There was a dispute in progress between BR and the drivers over something called 'flexible rostering'.  Most people outside the industry thought this must be something quite positive, like 'flexitime' for office workers.  For the drivers, it was a fundamental attack on their terms and conditions of employment since their work patterns were already pretty 'flexible', with the starting time of a shift able to be moved up to two hours between one day and the next.  So a week of 2am shifts might start at that time on day one but at 00.01 the next night, back to 02.00 after that and then 03.50, depending on requirements, with the next shift's start time advised at booking off from the one before.  If he was on nights, Dad would leave my mum a note when he came home and before he went to bed, to say what time he was due at work the following night and, on that basis, when he was likely to be up and about and what they could therefore do during the day.  

The pay-off for that flexibility was, if the right guy was 'running foreman', a degree of goodwill in letting staff go home early if there wasn't work for the latter part of their shift and there was a bit of emergency cover.  During the summer holidays we might get an odd day at the beach on the basis that Dad had been allowed to 'slide off' and so got a longer early morning sleep than usual.  The same was true when booked on 'spare' - to cover for unexpected absences and emergencies - when some of the crews might get to 'slide off' early if everything was quiet.  That goodwill was repaid by the drivers with great enthusiasm for their job and commitment to their industry, despite the diabolical hours and conditions - for example, many diesel locomotives cabs were so poorly insulated that old newspapers had to be rolled up and stuffed into the gaps and cracks to stop the draughts.  No fun at 100mph on a cold winter's night! 

'Flexible rostering' meant further uncertainty, allowing the basic hours of a shift to last between 7 and 9 hours of standard time, rather than the basic 8.  Operationally, you can see the sense of this; few shifts could be devised which neatly used eight hours work.  However, with drivers' income heavily dependent on an arcane system of overtime and anti-social hours payments ('time-and-five-eighths' being one rate - train drivers were impressive mental mathematicians on payday), 'flexible rostering' threatened both their income and that last little bit of predictability in their working lives - a guaranteed eight hour day.  That disputes like this were lost is arguably where the road to the 'zero-hours contract' begins.

In 1982, the train drivers - and their 'militant' union ASLEF - were very much a part of the 'Enemy Within' to the Tory establishment and it was therefore necessary to undermine their cause as thoroughly as possible.  So when two young 'second men' from Dad's own depot were prepared to sell their story - of 'sliding off' to go to the disco in work time - to none other than The Sun, it did the drivers' cause no good at all.  At no stage did any of the mainstream media properly explain the dispute and even the left-leaning Not the Nine o'clock News sketch-show couldn't resist a reference to the 'disco' story.  By no means a communist, the only paper Dad said gave the drivers' case a fair airing was the Morning Star.  (We had quite an eclectic mix of newspapers in the house when I was growing up, depending on what Dad found left behind by that day's commuters). 

All this was going on when I was in my last year at sixth-form college and had a massive impact on my political outlook, not least through trying to explain the reality to fellow students who thought it was funny to ask if they should look out for my Dad at the disco that night.  I saw how difficult it was to get fair coverage for your case and how quick politicians and the media were to condemn the 'selfishness' of workers supposedly 'holding the country to ransom' over something as trivial as fair pay and decent working conditions.
Today, I'd like to think it would be easier to fight back, with send-up Instagram pics of train drivers on the picket lines in their flares, open-necked satin shirts and medallions, and 'I'm in work, Peter'* Facebook posts.  In some ways, though, looking at how meekly much of the media take the Government line on the current Junior Doctors' dispute, I fear it would be much the same.  I can't help noticing that it's always "The Doctors' Union, The BMA" from our newsreaders these days (because Unions are a bad thing, of course, and God forbid that the general public mistake the BMA for anything legit), though we're never introduced to think-tank spokespeople as, for example, "Jack Slyme from The Centre for Social Justice, founded by Iain Duncan Smith to promote his personal agenda on Welfare."

At least in their dispute over pay and conditions the Junior Doctors do still have overwhelming public support - not least because a lot of people, like me, owe their lives or the lives of people they love to their dedication.  I think most people understand that intelligent professionals don't take action lightly and that if they say this deal is bad for both their profession and their patients, they're more likely than a politician to know.  Sadly, the opposite assumption tends to be made of blue-collar workers who, when they aren't simply being 'selfish', are still rarely portrayed as better than the dull-witted dupes of their unscrupulous, politically-motivated 'Union Bosses'.  If you'd ever seen a train driver checking the sums on his payslip in his head, before quibbling with the pay clerk over whether he'd got time-and-five-eighths rather than time-and-three for the overtime last Sunday, you would never dare assume that blue-collar workers are easily bamboozled.

*Sir Peter Parker was Chairman of the British Railways Board in 1982.

To tweet... or not to tweet?

More likely to 'tweet' than I am!

I've recently completed a series of short stories, deploying my best-loved characters (the ones I like best, that is, although hopefully they're also popular with readers) in a series of silly film parodies.  I'm saving Daphne's staring role (in Snakes on a Narrowboat) for a bonus chapter at the end of another novel with the redoubtable Geordie boatwoman at the helm.  However, even the chance to use a great punning title could not persuade me to write the role he most wanted for failed DWP investigator turned seedy private eye 'Fishy' Pike - Fifty Shades of Gary therefore remains unwritten, mercifully, not least because none of my female characters wanted any part in it!

I write because I enjoy writing - at least when I am motivated to do so and when my characters are active in my mind - although, as I have explained, I also write to redress the picture painted by the mainstream media of our Social Security system and of benefit claimants.  If the 'counter-propaganda' purpose of my stories is to succeed, they need to reach a wider audience than they do at present.  If this is to happen, I need to get better at promoting them to new readers.

I've seen quite a few articles expounding the virtues of Twitter as a marketing tool, since 'tweets', accessorised with the appropriate 'hashtag', can be read by anyone following that debate, not just your 'friends'.  Once you have 'followers' (presumably attracted by something clever and pithy you've tweeted) they will 'retweet' your words of wisdom or links to your work.

I've discounted it in the past for the simple reason that I can't imagine saying anything worthwhile in a mere 140 characters.  I'm not saying I'm always long-winded, but while I might tease my short-but-fearless-around-bloody-great-spiders husband about the probability of finding Samwise Gamgee somewhere in his family tree, I suspect if I get far enough back in mine I'll find actual family trees; I can be positively Entish about getting to the point.

As you will have noticed.

I quite like the idea of letting the Solent Welfare Rights Project have a Twitter account, not least because it would save me personally from having to fend off trolls who might glance at my photo and assume I'm Professor Mary Beard, though I have no idea whether there's any kind of protocol about fictional characters 'tweeting'.  Which of the gang gets to do the 'tweeting' could cause discord, though.  Martin would be good at it, though would need Hilary to censor him and a strict limit on time allowed online to prevent him spending too much time debating whatever bile-fuelled poison Katie Hopkins has vomited into the ether that day.  Tricia might manage a better balance of smart comment and professional decorum.

Anyway, to try to get a feel for Twitter, I've spent a few hours mooching about on it without actually signing up.  I'm still not really sure that I 'get it'.  I found a 'books' section with links to various newspapers' literary review pages and articles, plus dozens of tweets from Richard Dawkins, including one rather well-phrased one about the implicit misogyny of using slang terms for female genitalia as terms of abuse. If I put her in charge of the Solent Welfare Rights Projects' account, Hilary Carrington would certainly have retweeted - or did Dawkins actually retweet it from her?!  Astonishingly, I noticed that a mere 'good evening, folks' from E L James was 'liked' by over 300 people had scores of retweets.  I may be missing something here, but how is a standard greeting from anyone - unless it's someone terribly famous and previously assumed to be dead - worthy of a 'retweet'?  I may have to check that the author wasn't actually E. L. V I S!

Anyway, I think this old Luddite is going to need to sit down with a fellow human who uses Twitter and have her or him explain slowly and patiently what it's for and how to use it properly.  Only then, after a period of careful observation, might I let 'the gang' get to work, or even dabble myself.

In the meanwhile, I can always troll the DWP's Facebook page...