THE ELSIE TENNER

As I sometimes will, I ill-advisedly weighed into the debate on bank notes the other day by pointing out to someone who was complaining about the lack of female representation upon them that "the Queen is on all of them, of course" a smug comment for which I was quite rightly slapped down, but which I felt was a point worth making because in all of the articles that have been written about these matters over the past few days, that one point is seldom made.

For good reason, of course, because she's not actually there on merit but because of a tradition dating back through thousands of years and a fair few empires.

Anyway, the good-natured banter continued and the person I was e-chatting (actually the representative of the "Lass O'Gowrie" pub in Manchester) to mentioned that they were quite keen for the strong female characters from "Coronation Street" to appear on the notes, from Ena Sharples on the fiver right on through to Annie Walker on the fifty.

I "wittily" retorted "An Elsie Tenner...?" which was enthusiastically received with a hearty "someone should mock one of those up" and, with the aid of a handy ten-minute coffee break and a couple of Photoshop filters, ten minutes later, in my own lazy and slightly incompetent way, I had, because I couldn't imagine anyone else being bothered to...

Obviously, someone more committed to the "joke" might have spent an entire evening mocking up something far more elaborate and convincing but sometimes it's just about throwing stuff together to get the point across, and I hope that the two-hundred-plus people who went and had a look, and the debate that was started later on that evening about what people might spend it on gave them all a few seconds of fun as they travelled on through this bleak grey world of ours.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the chances of the powers that be putting either Emmeline pankhurst or Jane Austen on the fiver seems to be a pretty safe bet at the moment, considering that there seems to have been quite a backlash since it was announced that Elizabeth Fry was going to be replaced by Sir Winston Churchill.

Emmeline Pankhurst makes the most sense, I suppose, given that her efforts did far more to change the ordinary lives of so many women than a lot of people have, although Mary Seacole, Mary Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Bronte also have their supporters.

But this is the problem isn't it?

As "Horrible Histories" have also found, it's actually quite difficult to trawl through the pages of history and find many strong female role models to get the girls to also feel connected to our history because for so much of our history women were either not allowed to be in positions of power or simply not recognised by the patriarchal culture in which they existed.

So it might seem rather strange then that so many of that short list are writers, as if that was one of the very few ways that you could make any impact as a woman in those pre-twentieth century days. Unless you were a goddess of course, or an empress, or a queen, or a freedom fighter, or a saint, or a mistress, or a whore... The occasional scientist gets remembered, of course, and the odd economist, nurse, or engineer, but all-in-all, it's not the longest of lists.

Interestingly enough that anonymous person from the "Lass O'Gowrie" might have stumbled upon the interesting point that it is in television drama, and most especially the soaps, that the strongest female role models have been considered to be more universally acceptable and have been allowed to shine and dominate their environments.

It's also quite fascinating to see how poorly Australia treated its first female Prime Minister and not just this week, but over the entire duration of her tenure.

The world, it seems, still has an awful long way to go.