“A hundred arrests are made in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire in the worst violence of the miners’ strike so far. Police clash with miners outside several collieries, and NUM leader Arthur Scargill accuses officers of intimidation. Anti-apartheid protesters besiege the Home Office after last week’s decision to grant British citizenship to the South African runner Zola Budd. And Senator Gary Hart fights to continue his campaign against Walter Mondale for the Democratic nomination in the US Presidential race.” The announcer’s voice droned on, fleshing out the day’s headlines. But Lindsay’s mind was already miles away.

It had been a mistake to come. She had been too easily persuaded by Ian. She wasn’t ready for this. It was hard enough coping with the day to day routine of life, a routine that was manageable precisely because it was familiar, because her mind could drift off into free-fall while she gave the appearance of being in touch with what was going on around her. But to plunge into something so strange and challenging as her first national union conference was madness. It had been bad enough just reading about conference. She’d had to give up on the “Advice for New Delegates” booklet half-way through, her head spinning with such bizarre and diverse items as “taking a motion seriatim” and “compositing sessions.” How on earth was she going to wrestle with the real thing with only half her brain functioning?

Ian had meant well, she knew that. He was a news sub-editor on the tabloid newspaper where Lindsay, at twenty-five, was the most junior staff reporter. When she had started to show an interest in the union, speaking up at the meetings of the Daily Nation’s office chapel, it was Ian who had taken the time to explain to her how their union functioned in national newspapers. He had spent the weary, slow hours of several night-shifts outlining the organization and the internal politics that governed the union far more than the rule book.

Lindsay, who had learned about socialism and solidarity from her fisherman father as soon as she could grasp the concepts, was bemused by the schisms and hierarchies of what she had naïvely imagined would be an organization unified by a common aim. It didn’t take her long to decide that the entrenched power of the national newspaper chapels generated its own in-built conservatism, and that the real arenas for potential change within the union lay elsewhere. The radical concepts of feminism and genuinely representative democracy that were dear to her were clearly never going to find fertile soil in this sector of the industry. Here traditions had provided the hacks with a comfort zone where they could all be good old boys together, and to hell with troublesome dykes, poofs, women, jungle bunnies and cripples.