the way out is 👉 right now & 🫵 right here

Dame Patricia Routledge (17 February 1929 – 3 October 2025)

One month before her 95th birthday, Patricia Routledge wrote something that still gently echoes:

“I’ll be turning 95 this coming Monday. In my younger years, I was often filled with worry — worry that I wasn’t quite good enough, that no one would cast me again, that I wouldn’t live up to my mother’s hopes. But these days begin in peace, and end in gratitude….

My life didn’t quite take shape until my forties. I had worked steadily — on provincial stages, in radio plays, in West End productions — but I often felt adrift, as though I was searching for a home within myself that I hadn’t quite found….

At 50, I accepted a television role that many would later associate me with — Hyacinth Bucket, of Keeping Up Appearances. I thought it would be a small part in a little series. I never imagined that it would take me into people’s living rooms and hearts around the world. And truthfully, that role taught me to accept my own quirks. It healed something in me.

At 60, I began learning Italian — not for work, but so I could sing opera in its native language. I also learned how to live alone without feeling lonely. I read poetry aloud each evening, not to perfect my diction, but to quiet my soul.

At 70, I returned to the Shakespearean stage — something I once believed I had aged out of. But this time, I had nothing to prove. I stood on those boards with stillness, and audiences felt that. I was no longer performing. I was simply being.

At 80, I took up watercolor painting. I painted flowers from my garden, old hats from my youth, and faces I remembered from the London Underground. Each painting was a quiet memory made visible.

Now, at 95, I write letters by hand. I’m learning to bake rye bread. I still breathe deeply every morning. I still adore laughter — though I no longer try to make anyone laugh. I love the quiet more than ever.

I’m writing this to tell you something simple:

Growing older is not the closing act. It can be the most exquisite chapter — if you let yourself bloom again.**

Let these years ahead be your *treasure years*.

You don’t need to be famous. You don’t need to be flawless.

You only need to show up — fully — for the life that is still yours.

With love and gentleness”

Patricia Routledge died today 3rd October 2025

*

*

Accepting a diversity of tactics provides for the broad diversity of real human beings. Every individual has a different life history, and consequently finds different activities meaningful and liberating. Insisting that everyone should adopt the same approach is arrogant and shortsighted—it presumes that you are entitled to make judgments on others' behalf—and also unrealistic: any strategy that demands that everyone think and act the same way is doomed to failure, for human beings are not that simple or submissive. Critics often charge that the tactics they oppose will alienate potential participants, but the more diverse the tactics employed by a movement, the wider the range of people who can recognize among those tactics approaches that appeal to them. It may be necessary for factions applying different tactics to distance themselves from one another in the public eye, but this need not be done in an antagonistic spirit.

A movement that employs a diversity of tactics is able to adapt to changing contexts. Such a movement is a laboratory in which varous methods can be tested; the ones that work will be easy to identity, and will naturally become popular. As we haven't yet succeeded in overthrowing [patriarchy] once and for all by any method, all methods are still worth trying, in case one works. In this sense, those who employ tactics other than the ones you favor are doing you a service by saving you the trouble of having to test them for yourself.

Honoring a diversity of tactics means refraining from attacking those whose chosen approaches seem to you to be ineffective, and instead focusing on what missing elements you can add to make their efforts effective. Thus, it reframes the question of strategy in terms of personal responsibility: at every juncture, the question is not what somebody else should be doing, but what you can do.”

- don't know enough about it, and have only heard bad things so they stay away.

- know enough about it, the power it could potentially wield, and as such warn others away from it.

Their goal in calling radical feminists miserable doomers who have no hope/joy/fun etc, is to psyop other women into avoiding real, meaningful feminism and undermine class consciousness and solidarity.

Expressing our joys in radical feminism and solidarity with other women, will directly undermine their efforts. This is why it's just as important to publicly share the things that make you happy as a radical feminist, to counteract the propaganda employed by TRAs/TIMs to scare other women away from us.

Being openly happy and proud to be a woman, and a radical feminist, is revolutionary.

These were also posts that said, point blank, you don't need to feel guilty for that and that you don't owe these women anything. They often choose to live with and around males, despite knowing the same statistics and facts about male violence and crime we do.

Modernist artist Georgia O'Keeffe on one of her many camping trips into the desert.

New Mexico