Blog Awards: Chuffed of Crystal Palace!

I am naturally quite a smiley person but I think on Saturday night I took grinning to new widths when I heard my name being announced as the winner of the Campaign for Gender Balance Best Blog Post and had the, unique in my life time, experience of being presented with a little trophy cup!!

Other winners, as those who have been following these things know already, were People’s Choice Best Lib Dem Blog winner, Lynne Featherstone, Judge’s Choice Best Lib Dem Blog Alix Mortimer and Best non Lib Dem blog Betsan Powys.

Now, back to the cup…I have never, ever received a cup for anything in my entire life, ever before!!! I was tempted later on that evening to take this gorgeous little cup down with me for dinner at the Malmaison, but thought that sort of behaviour was more reminiscent of a six year old rather than a thirty six year old and not Malmaisonish at all. Still, I did sleep with it on my bedside table, so loath was I to let it out of my sight!!

The recognition for the blog post, was quite nice to receive too, no sorry, it was very nice, sublime, in fact, and I am dead chuffed. I was particularly interested to hear in the Lib Dem Voice podcast published last night, some of the comments that were made by the judges about my post; it was very handy to have the feedback about accessibility and also the good use of photos. I was obviously present when these comments were first made but my attempts at looking serene while waiting to hear the result meant that processing any other words but my own name was beyond me.

I am very pleased that it was a post on a topic so close to my heart and one that was acknowledged as controversial. I am going to take Mary Reid’s advice and let Johanna Sumuvuori MP know that meeting her led to me writing this post and that led to an award!

Meeting up with the other bloggers was great, if a little surreal as we all felt we knew each other already. I was also particularly pleased to see that the audience had plenty of men in it. I don’t want to live in a ‘women only’ blogging ghetto; I even caught sight of a certain fluffy elephant!

If you haven’t listened to it so far, do listen to Alix’s acceptance speech on the LDV podcast. It is natural for many liberals, I think, to question the need for a separate Campaign for Gender Balance Blog Awards, however as Alix pointed out, although some of us may have all the confidence we need to start blogging, others, whose voices are just as important, may need more encouragement. If nothing else, these awards have made the most confident conscious of that fact that not everybody has that attribute, which may be an invisible barrier to them getting their voice heard. Why is that a gender issue? Well, you just have to look at the outcome: the still relatively few numbers of lib dem women bloggers compared to male ones. It is not that women don’t have anything to say, they are just worried that nobody will want to listen.

Throughout the whole process, from having one of my blog posts nominated, to getting short listed and of course to winning a category, I have been tremendously encouraged. I hope that the posting that won can hold its own amongst both men and women as a good blog post but I am sure over the last few months I have become more confident in defining my own blogging voice that is unashamedly female, feminine and womanly as well as liberal and democratic!