What a difference a day makes. Over the past couple of weeks, I've been happy to take part in two commemorative days.
The first of these was World Book Day on March 2.
Reading opens up the world. The novelist Tom Clancy once said that: "The only way to do all the things you'd like to do is read" - books can take us to different times, places and states of mind and through fictional characters, we can often do and see things that we might never do or see in our own "real" lives.
One of the things that we must do is to make suret hat the experiences books can give people are open to everyone. For this reason, to mark World Book Day, I was very happy to welcome representatives from Toc H Cymru, the Cardiff Institute for the Blind and RNIB Cymru to my office in Cardiff.
Their organisations ahve a number of talking books available at a number of different outlets - a large range have been donated for those who have bision problems and have difficulty reading. I agreed to have a number of these tapes available at my surgeries for people to look through and take away - so if you are interested or know someone who would be, please come along to a surgery and have a browse.
This month also saw the commemoration of International Women's Day on March 8. I celebrated this both in Westminster and in Cardiff. For nearly 100 year, this has been a day when we celebrate the achievements of women - we think about all the progress we have made and also about what we still have yet to do.
We have, for example, improved our standing in politics, but this has not yet gone far enough. We now have 126 women MPs in the House of Commons, but this is still only 20%. And we may have doubled the number of Welsh women MPs at the last election from four to eight, but this is still only eight out of 40. Again, only 20%. As the writer Maya Angelou put it, "Being a woman is hard work" and it's going to take a lot of hard work before we have a truly representative UK parliament. To commemorate the day in Westminster, women MPs laid flowers at the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst and sang a rousing song.
To commemorate the day here in Cardiff, we presented a bouquet of flowers to Velindre Hospital in memory of Wendy Laing, a Labour stalwart who died last year. It was a day to remember all women like these, famous or not, who contribute so much to their communities.
So, of the 31 days in the month of March, two marked causes very dear to me - the importance of reading and the importance of women's rights. Days like these allow us to stop and take stock of what's important - to, quite simply, make a day of it. |
