Soldiers of justice who are winning the battle

switched... maybe a pre-menstrual woman in his life put him straight.

The SNP Government had objected to the bill on cost grounds, and there’s likely work to be done as it progresses now, but what message would it send if a government, led by a feminist like Nicola Sturgeon, can’t right the wrong of making girls and women pay for products for which they have a biological need?

Women of my generation and older had simply accepted the status quo, which seems bizarre now we come to think of it, ’cause we’re not exactly shrinking violets.

But periods were shameful and had to be hidden. The word itself was whispered as if you had “the plague”.

When, in 1992, agony aunt Clare Rayner did an advert for a sanitary towel “with wings”, there were 300 complaints yet, to my knowledge, no man’s head exploded with the trauma and no woman died of shame.

Imagine if, every four weeks for decades of their lives, men experienced heavy bleeding from their privates? There would be special hospitals dedicated to their time-of-the-month.

This is all about a new way of looking at the world, and it’s pretty inspiring.

I was thinking this as my nine-year-old daughter hit me with one of the dreaded growing-up-too-fast questions: “Mum, how do you know when you’re pregnant?”

So I told her, in very straightforward terms, about periods and eggs and fertilisation and how it’s not a secret because it’s all entirely normal and nothing in the least to worry about.

I didn’t say what my mum said to me: “I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

I was also able to reassure her that by the time her periods begin, there will be free sanitary products available everywhere. She’ll never be caught short, or have to ask for help, or be too skint to afford them as everyone realises girls need them and the human race wouldn’t continue if they didn’t.

“So I won’t bleed to death?” she said. And I didn’t tell her it might feel that way, sometimes.