Photo by TitiNicola, CC BY-SA 4.0.
I didn’t expect controversy to arise from my article covering late March 1985, including Jilly Black’s visit to Keele:
But it did.
Jilly chimed in with this:
…one thing I do remember about a visit to Keele was… round to someone’s house…going into the kitchen for supper and being somewhat disturbed by the fact someone was sitting at the table with just a towel on. Do you remember who that might have been? Thank you anyway for another trip down memory lane. I remember our having an argument about what size of tampons should go in the machines in the women’s toilets at the university as well. What a selective memory I seem to have!
I suggested to Jilly that the venue was Ashley Fletcher’s place and that “towel man” was almost certainly Simon Legg, one of Ashley’s flatmates at that time. Simon might confirm or deny.
I then, perhaps foolishly, asked Jilly to elaborate about the great tampon debate. The following diatribe came:
Now, as far as the tampon size argument is concerned, I’m now trying to remember if Annalisa [de Mercur] was the one to support me in the argument that we had. Anyway, it was the year when you were running the student union or similar (please forgive my lack of specific information, as I didn’t keep diaries like yours unfortunately) but I do remember you were involved in deciding what tampon machine would go into the ladies loo, and, together with (I think) Annalisa, I was quite indignant over your choice of tampon size to go in the machine, as this had been made without suitable consumer experience of the selected product, and we were both of the opinion that your judgment on this occasion might not be so well appreciated by the eventual product users. If I’m not wrong, it seems that you took an executive decision and decided to stock the tampons you liked the most in the facilities without further consultation or discussion, and I frankly wonder to this day how it might have affected the overall wellbeing of those women who weren’t fortunate enough to make their own informed choices at the time.
In my own defence here, I cannot imagine that I ever made a decision about the products to be supplied in the women’s (or indeed anyone’s) lavatories.
This debate feels to me, like the work of wind-up merchants, which might well have included Ashley, Simon and, if I’m not mistaken, Helen Ross, who also shared a flat with Ashley. I don’t think Annalisa was there that evening.
I can certainly imagine all three of them: Ashley, Simon and Helen, wickedly confirming: “oh yes, Ian makes all of those personal care decisions in the union, with reckless abandon and no regard for the opinions of the service users”.
I can also imagine that any attempt at denial by me would have been systematically refuted by the others as a weak attempt by me to cover my dictatorial tracks in the matter of personal care products.
But Jilly’s strange memory piece raises a genuine question in my mind. Was there ACTUALLY an issue with regard to a mismatch between the products that students wanted and the products that were supplied in the Student’s Union loos? The truth of the matter, of course, was that the decisions about the specific mix of products in the machines would have come from the commercial provider. The economist in me believes that such a provider should, by dint of simple sales data, be able to provide a near optimal mix of products to maximise sales and satisfy demand. I realise that Ashley might now be laughing his head off while waving a copy of Careless Talk at me.
Anyway, putting politics and economics to one side, I would genuinely be interested to know whether or not Keele students from that era (or indeed any other era) actually felt that the vending machines were dispensing the wrong menstrual products.
As the Rolling Stones put it on the album Let It Bleed, “you can’t always get what you want”.