FebulousFebruary 2026: The Old Photograph

day seven

At 16, everything was a protest. We protested the inequality of women with our wardrobes, dresses made of old curtains and charity-shop finds, hair cut with a Stanley knife, shaved our heads instead of our legs, disdained make-up and wore hand-knitted socks. Because it’s better to take control of your own weird, than be stuck with the weird people think you are, right?

At artschool, we wore our weirdness like a badge, alongside “Nuclear Power No Thanks” , “A Woman’s Right to Choose”, and “Paolozzi is God”. We protested enforced conformity, the dull limits of a predetermined future; you can’t trust a policeman, you can’t trust a journalist, you can’t trust anyone over 30. We thought we could change the world by painting it. We reinvented ourselves monthly.

Later, after reality kicked in, we marched, singing, handcrafted banners aloft and Bovril sandwiches in the backpack. We cycled round London protesting the bomb, dressed in radiation suits and Maggie Thatcher masks…

We delivered gigantic valentine cards to MPs, protesting section 28 and demanding the right to love whomever we chose…

We Funked the royal wedding at Clissold Park, in Demolition Decorators Tshirts and the blissful expressions of those who saw no hypocrisy in the street-party beanfeast we had just eaten. We hung red, white and blue underwear, Doc Martens boots and Che Guevara bandanas as bunting, and threw wet sponges at our neighbours, with their heads through holes cut into a seaside-photographer portrait of Charles and Di. Because every good protest is an excuse for performance art, right?

We partied at Pride, marching, whistling, hamming it up for the straight media, Bovril sandwiches replaced now by flasks of Pimms. We morris danced in Michelle Shocked hats and rainbow tshirts, falling down drunk in the women’s tent, falling in love as a statement. We thought we could change the world by making it happy…Party as Protest…

which , somewhere along the line, became party instead of protest. Because we have equality now, right?

Meanwhile: online, in the global village, the village people are asking for our help. But will petitions, rants, angry tweets and satirical videos, memes, and cryptic status updates with secret messages of support do the job? Will Cassette Boy save the world by laughing at it? Can we harness the power of the skateboarding goat and the Polish roadrage man to make us free? Because until we are all free, until every woman, every gay, black, disenfranchised, abused, unregarded…every person is free, then none of us is free.

I miss the marches, the bike rides, the publicity stunts, the grand gestures, the thousands of faces shining with zealous joy, the sense of family. I miss the here-and-nowness, the face-to-faceness of dynamically sharing all that creativity and harnessing it to some social good; I miss the stamina I had. I’m going back out there and take my protest off social media and into the streets. Join me…Because protest is important, but we also need to get our daily exercise, right?

Fin McMorran / Gateshead

day six

The Mermaid’s Sea. By MajIkle

Your call has dragged me into this inky swell with my clothes torn away, breath ragged, swimming for my life towards a mythical blue tail.

The penetrating moon fluoresces pink onto the mirror of sea when finally I crawl beside your incredible body. Begging you with foolish promises.

Your scales, softened by their immersion still shimmer unearthly hypnotic electric blue even this close to you. Silk skin of belly, breast and arms and face are the colour of human ochre but your eyes are vast pools of spellbinding dark light. Your beauty engulfs me till I cannot remember a time when I did not love you.

Waterfalls of hair seaweed curl around us both as you pull me close, bidding me look to the stars to see our story being told but below the water you are insinuating yourself between my slick legs.

My eyes ache from staring, unable to believe you are real even when I can smell the salty tang of my strong secretions but you urge me to let you continue to explore the space inside me.

You are fascinated with my treasure cave. You tell me nothing can stop you from slipping inside the opening into my heart. Beguiled I willingly let you further and further in until you fill me entirely.

Your hands encounter no resistance in my boneless body, as they orchestrate their storm, my voice bellows a tempest wind as your urgency heaves wave upon wave of sea out from me. Splashing like babbling streams, some hidden iceburg has melted finally.

Then before you push me off your rock to play with my newly formed iridescent tail, you whisper deep inside my shell that all of our sea is made from secretors like me.

day five

White out walls over panel of old words

New canvas for letters of love and protest.

In the look out spots of higher ground,

Your colours of rebellion

Flags of recognition and voice.

We were here to rise above,

Ascent to say

We were here.

JJ

day four

A FROZEN FEBRUARY IN WALES

Yesterday in Brecon a barn owl, screeching out her hunger to the ink black night,   landed on a frozen line,

And, as four hundred volts passed through her undetected,

she released

a veil of icy particles, that floated down

to a frozen ground

already white and dusted with fine snow.

Following this line some 85 miles, – this line

That generates a billion plus of sterling corporate profit,

This same line

beneath the same frozen sky of leaden snow,

Two men, in an abandoned Cardiff depot, lean against a pole

Furtively sharing a pipe

of crack cocaine;

seeking a comfort, that hungers still for more.

Settling, they soak in what love and heat their bodies offer the other

Under a blanket and tarp, that even in this frozen air, emanates the slightest odor of stale piss.

And in their sleep they hope their night will pass, for once, unmolested.

Two miles away retail outlets burn and blaze their profligate profits into the empty night.

I.M.                             Jan 18

day three

PROTEST

Back when I was a shiny youth

I marched upon a rainy street

 A wild sea of women talking with their feet

 I heard the thunder of a thousand voices shout

In righteous anger for our right

‘Reclaim the night’

‘Reclaim the night’.

Then in my burnished middle years,

I saw a million women rise,

For an end to domestic violence,

 we chanted at the skies,

 And again a tumultuous sea of women,

In their anger roared,

NO MORE, NO MORE, NO MORE!

Now in my tarnished age

I hear a million, million voices soar

An insistent susurration along a thousand shores.

ME TOO, ME TOO, ME TOO.

And when a million, million voices speak,

THEY ROAR!

This time let no mean no forever

And let forever mean forever more.

Meg Williams

day two

out in the city

by

Jane campbell

Two women: both dykes.

One/ primped up pretty/ giving it the bleached blonde/ lip-sticked/ feather bowered girlie.

The other a man-she/ a him-her/ the butch.

Nobody stares at us because there is nothing to see/ we are looking like them/camouflaged

Me and B/ my B/ broad in the coat/ gorgeous tall/ working class enough/ to be proper tough/ and we need to be because it is 1987 and every single day/ one of us dies from Aids.

We die but they do nothing/ because we die from ignorance/ apparently.

Anarchy in the UK is getting soft/its going off the boiling stage/ leaving us at the mercy of tepid ballads/ that focus our eyes on the guise of/ just wanting to dance with somebody/ or fill our pockets with loads a money.

Except we can’t because/ we are the three million unemployed

With nothing to do but watch/ Jim’ll fix it on telly to learn about love

or

Blankety Blank to hear jokes about/ the blacks and the poofters/ lesbians’ though/

we are alone when we are together/ making do/ just us two/ waiting for a real man to give us a proper seeing to.

Seriously?

If we’d collected a ‘naff tax’ on just that/ we could have bought us an island by now

/to escape to.

Bee and I are glad we don’t look gay/ we are homophobia free happy this way/ passing for strait we become more and more/ blatantly sexual so…

Strange as it sounds

Debenhams becomes the site of our/ DIY porno/ leaving our clothes in the changing rooms/ like Mr Benn we wander about for hours/ dressed like old ladies in corsets/ wigs and hats/ or don dog collars and drop to all fours/ playing puppy who’ll fetch/ along shop corridors/ nobody is paid enough to bother us/ nobody cares/ if we go Rocky three in sportswear/ or if B orders a milky coffee in a silk suit/ from menswear first floor/ with me laid across her lap/ the worst example of a St Trinian’s child whore/ till the women’s toilets call

or

We lock ourselves/ into British library reading rooms/ refusing when asked to come out quietly/ until the fetch the key/ and we storm out imperious/ shouting where’s the loo?

But the truth is every gap between parked cars/ is our personal pissoir.

The scrawls on the dyke toilet walls tell us/ ‘Lesbians are fucking everywhere,’/ so Bee and me/ we go there/ no graveyard or alley escapes our lewdliness/ and not just fingers wet/ we are whole hand fisting/ throat clenching some/ pushing heads between legs/ learning how only women come.

Suddenly we capture the camera’s stare/‘Love Bites,’ by Della Grace/is our pretend family album/ we become a gang in there/ sexing each other up/ in fake weddings with whips/ rattling our big fat bike chains/ and sticking out mucky rubber dicks.

Somehow now we are on TV/ in the nations living rooms/ where the country eat their tea/ so now even Margaret Thatcher can see us frigging in the rigging/ there was fuck all else to do.

Pop stars like Madonna and Sinead O’Connor/ want people to think they might be dykey/ we have made the zeitgeist/ they look more like us than we do/ as lesbian chic floods the mainstream.

Cheek more than chic though/ prostituting us worse than pimps do/ never give us a single penny/ of the money / do you?

I lie.

Truth is they do pay in a way/ kept us poor like a reservoir/ you could say I lived off

the wages I was due/ my fortnightly dole/ all I had to do was queue/ but you better not be late/ because they could make you worse than wait.

So

Unlike my foreign girl sisters/ I didn’t have to do hand jobs/ in the peeps shows of Soho/ still it was not enough to keep us out/ of toe curling second hand shoes/ and that shit don’t go.

Finally

Bee and me belong/ to Chain Reaction our dyke sex family/ and we start spreading the love we feel/ financially, socially, sexually/ by showing each other our cunts/ lips, clits, skin colour/ as we spread our legs widely

Pleasing ourselves and one another

All of us the same and different

All of us ‘proud of it’ queens

All of us resisting the shame regime

By coming fucking together.

day one

For the Common Good

Antonia Chain

‘It looks… dull’.

Signposts direct visitors to ‘New Greenham Park’, the once infamous name sanitised. Nature had reclaimed the common now, just an un-fenced openness with few traces of the ugliness that used to occupy the terrain. The derelict control tower looks smaller than Jenna remembers.

‘The missiles left in ’93 but the camps hung on for a few more years’ Jenna explains though she can see her teenage daughter is bored.

Jenna followed Maeve to Greenham Common women’s peace camp, but Maeve was interested in nonviolent protest and not her. Jenna, like the hundreds of women who set up the peace camps around the US military base, was angered by NATO’s decision to site American cruise missiles in England. In truth though Maeve was her reason for being there, though her adoration was unreciprocated, and she hated the primitive conditions of the camp. Her allocated home, a ‘bender’, was a dwelling made of tarpaulin draped over bent saplings. It was cold and damp. She loathed the mud, shitting in the woods, communally cooked lentil slop and the relentless preternatural ululating of the keening women. It annoyed Jenna as much as it unnerved the soldiers.

Walking back from a night out in Newbury, soldiers urinated on tents until it became a childish, irritating norm whilst verbal aggression became a game neither side took seriously. The Americanism ‘asshole’ had been adopted by some women. ‘Motherfucker’ had not.

When Jenna heard the ‘Yo! Bitches’ she sleepily tugged up her sleeping bag. It was the smell that fully woke her. Wood smoke was the scent of the camp – the acrid chemical of burning nylon was not. Jenna was on high alert before she fully understood why.

Two soldiers where throwing the djembe’s on the campfire. Drum stands and kit were strewn around. Hot embers were kicked into a tent and it caught fire.

‘Guys, guys – come on, let’s go!’ A third soldier pleaded with his rampaging comrades.

Jenna knew that most of the tents and benders were empty. A peace vigil was being held on a missile silo inside the base. She had not gone; avoiding arrest the night before she left camp. The distant sound of protest songs carried on the night air whilst the women’s homes – tarpaulin, nylon, plastic sheets, like falling dominos, caught alight.

‘Get her!’ was all Jenna needed to hear before she ran feeling the pursuing combustive pops as another camp dwelling imploded in hot flame.

Instinctively Jenna knew she was in danger. Not the potential danger of the nuclear missiles but real and imminent peril. The soldiers were drunk, mean and feral – and they were closing in on her.

When he grabbed her hair, yanking her painfully, Jenna was terrified. He misjudged and pulled too hard, and as she flew backwards, he lost his footing. Jenna landed on him, leapt up, and jumped hard on his knee. She heard the crack of broken bone and the screams of the soldier on the ground. She ran into the camp latrine area and crouched in the ferns trying to still her ragged breathing, so loud she was sure it would be heard above the flames.

‘Earl, get over here – we have her!’

Jenna recognised the cowboy drawl. He was the soldier who kicked the burning log into the tent, the ringleader.

‘Come out you fucking dyke’.

Jenna heard the rustle of the dried ferns as he stalked her. Committed to protecting the environment, a forested patch close to camp had been created. Troughs, known as ‘shit pits’, dug with sand buckets in place for those less able to squat. Later, when recalling the moment, Jenna could not explain how the idea came to her, but she crouched over a bucket.

‘Do you MIND?!” she loudly exclaimed.

Reflexively the soldier hesitated.

Jenna seized the moment, grasped the bucket handle and swung it with all her might at the head of the soldier. The soldier fell unconscious to the ground, the contents of the fetid bucket soiling his pristine uniform.

‘Hey, hey, you…stop. I don’t want to hurt you’.

The boyish face of the third soldier called, and Jenna ran towards the hole in the perimeter fence, cut earlier that evening to get access for the base invasion. She could hear women keening in the near distance and hoped she could get to them before he got to her.

Sentry patrols had eventually been reduced because the soldiers became over friendly, or over aggressive, with the women who asked them ‘why do you want to kill our children?’ Military training had not prepared soldiers for peaceful direct action by women. Rolls of barbed wire littered the base landscape, but they too were never enough to keep the women out.

Jenna felt arms circle her waist and tackle her to the ground. Fighting like a dervish her elbow connected with his nose and a well-placed heel dragged down his shin. He placed his hand over her mouth. She bit into his palm tasting blood. He yelped in pain.

‘Please, please…. Be quiet. I have something I need to give you’.

Something in his tone ended the fight. Despite the uniform and the actions of his comrades Jenna instinctively understood he was not her enemy. He reached into the pocket of his fatigues, thrust folded papers at her and ran away as women began to arrive back to the carnage of the burned out camp.

The papers, stapled together had ‘top secret’ stamped on the front.

Claudia rolls her eyes when the story was told.

‘Seriously mum, you think you closed the base? Ego – much? What even is a nuclear code book anyway?’

Jenna remembers seeing the news report of the last convoy ever leaving the base. She remembers handing the papers over to one of the camp activists and seeing the story of the leaked documents hit the news a couple of weeks after she left. She wonders what happened to the scared young soldier. Sometimes, she wonders what happened to beautiful Maeve.

day twenty eight

We stand up for the lookout

Joining hands, heart, spirit and voice

we danced on the tip of a cruise missile

demanding decommissioning of nuclear weapons

we frustrated authority by being leaderless, articulate, non violent protestors

circling the base a thousand women strong

Abseiling angels in DM’s

we upturned the Lords’ apple cart

appealing to Queenie’s assumed better nature

flat top suffragettes

we chained ourselves to her front gate

gnawing wretching at rotten section 28

eventually spitting it back to the gutter

where it came from and where it belonged

marching ten thousand queers strong

Spirals of freedom, cultivating womyn’s lands,

women in tune with nature’s cycles, peace, fairness and love

connecting linking rejecting violence against women

malevolent misogyny patronising patriarchy

rising up a million women strong

Forever weaving our web

forever spiraling

forever resisting

Gung-ho leadership invading Iraq

Wherever we started we still come from that place

Hush! Put your ear to the conche and you can hear the demands of the Greenham echoing through the years

“We want better.” “Not in my name” “We want better.” “Not in my name” “We want better.” “Not in my name”

protesting millions of people strong

Fiona Thomson, Margate

day twenty seven

When I was eight, I had a doll for Christmas. She was a big smiling baby with curly nylon hair and a mouth that opened and closed. Best of all, when you pressed her belly button, she spoke. There was a flap in her back into which you could put small plastic records like miniature vinyl discs, so that she could say things like ‘tickle me mummy!’ or sing nursery rhymes. I liked the doll. I liked changing the records. There was even a white one which made her sing Christmas songs. I never wanted a baby. I never had one. Instead I got a seven year old boy who pissed himself and bit his arms when he was angry. He tore his t shirt with his teeth when we said no, wiped his shit carefully on the bedroom window and never stood still. He also peered deeply into our eyes as if to understand what was in there and reached across the dinner table to say firmly ‘you love me’. He gave us his pleasures and happiness at full volume, screaming with joy at the swimming pool, eating sausages and chocolate fingers at parties till he was sick and laughing at bedtime stories till his face was red and tears fell. And if I had known when I had that doll the rising tide of love for this boy, if I had known how I would hang over his bed at night to breathe the smell of him, how I would hold the things he drew at school like precious artefacts perfect in their beauty and full of meaning, the places I would go as I followed after him never standing still but running into life. If I had known I would not have asked for the doll. I would have asked for something else. A bumper book of tips for children who did not start as a smiling baby. A kit for decoding messages of desperation, signals of confusion. Something to strengthen my legs for running. As it turns out though, the things my mum and dad gave me, at Christmas and between, seem to have been enough.

Del, Wales

day twenty six

Hogmanay, Blairmore, 2014

By Sheila McWattie, submitted by Jill, Sheila’s sister

half-gasps. flickers give rise to half-

breaths; recognition. a passing.

lips drying at the thought of almost-gone.

who knows? this one was odd; quick;

often too busy. ticking off appointments.

the sudden was the best: Carol Ann

Duffy on the train. Lesley from America.

Venice lunch close to the Rialto bridge.

Scottish heritage bringing pearly tears

en route to Portavadie……will ye no come

back again?

remembering / discovering deep peace.

happy. rapture. from that bank of stillness

deep down: the more stock up, the

more is available……..

five pens in my leather bag: a good omen.

catching my breath at what I don’t yet

know. where? who? what? how?

when? all we can do is breathe.

all we can lose is gone.

all we can cherish is here.

all we can see is now……..

(and) all we can know is love.