A striking difference

A mild day, with clouds and sunshine, good for walking, and after a housekeeping morning, I did a circuit of the port and the Old Town, and simply enjoyed being back in this wonderful city, with so much happening to notice.

The quayside Palmeria de Sorpresas seems strangely empty now last summer's exhibition of thirty odd life size bronze sculptures by Elena Laverón under the banner Caminantes en el Puerto has moved on. They attracted a great deal of positive attention from passers-by who now can only walk, and pause less often to take pictures with the life sized oeuvres. Back last summer, I walked that route several times a week. Their absence has given me a far better idea of both the social impact and the value of good public art. How will the cultural commissars of the Ajuntamiento de Málaga follow on from this, I wonder?

International Women's Day is being celebrated today, I don't know about elsewhere, but here it's accompanied by advocating a 'Huelga Feminista' - women on strike, refusing to go shopping, and conform to the common stereotype.

It made me smile, then laugh out loud. Listening to the early news, we were reminded of the many outstanding achievements of women in our time, and how far from genuinely equal opportunity we still are, but, as ever in the mass media, it was all talk within the media bubble about the educated privileged elites of society.

Women worldwide still take most responsibility for obtaining everyday food provisions, and home making. Shopping in all its forms, whether for basic essentials or for rare luxuries is part of a woman's daily routine. The notion of a shopping strike is quixotic, whimsically comic, but makes the point about something all too easily taken for granted, a systemic part of existing inequality. Thank heavens for a little anarchic provocation! But can we think of what a world would look like where all women and men have, make use of equal opportunities, while at the same time valuing the different approaches and priorities women and men have in life? This isn't impossible, but essential to my mind. In every generations, women and men have so much to learn from each other about how to address the issues threatening our very existence today.