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IT was International Women’s Day yesterday. For me, the biggest impact was programming on Radio 3 that destroyed my Sunday listening amid a sonic tsunami of squawks, scrapes and bloody Bjork and her Emperor’s-new-clothes mews and howls. Modernist women composers everywhere. God, it was awful.

The second biggest impact was flicking through the comments on social media. Lots of the Tweets about the importance of International Women’s Day were from men. On the wider airwaves, men were having their say about women’s day. Other Tweets came from men, asking when there would be an international men’s day. Yet more comments attacked these men – the attackers being, mainly, men.

What a waste of everybody’s breath and air the whole charade is. Days like International Women’s Day, or Mother’s Day, or Father’s Day – they’re all just empty media creations designed to satisfy the chatterati on Radio 4 or enable massive global corporations to sell us their tawdry tat and their banal cards.

Every day should be women’s day, and men’s day too: we shouldn’t need an annual reminder to think of women and their right to equality in everything from status to wages – we should be standing up for that right every bloody day.

We have a strange fascination with dates, we humans. For example. Every anniversary of my mother’s death, my sister places flowers on her grave. It wouldn’t occur to me for a moment to do that – to think any more or less of my mother on a particular day. Makes no difference to her now, and I certainly don’t need a date in my diary to remind me that I once had a mother.

This is not to decry people who find anniversaries and dates a comfort. But it does underline the fact that every such day – from a birthday to International Women’s Day – is about the people who are observing the date, not about the subject or the cause.

International Women’s Day allows glib politicians to make all the right noises about equality. And as soon as the day is over, they go back to their rich male chums round the Cabinet table.

Days mean nothing at all. Political intent to spread equality – between people, between religions, between the sexes – is what counts, but try to persuade people to join the campaign for worldwide decency and see how far you get. They’ll all be too busy celebrating International I’m Too Stupid To Take Any of This Seriously, Best Watch Some Football On The Telly Day, shortly to be followed by International Fuckwit Day.

The sunken ship

I see there’s a campaign to save the ship. This is the building in Plymouth created as a new headquarters for the Western Morning News and Plymouth Evening Herald newspapers in the 1990s.

I worked for both newspapers at various points in my life, and hated the wretched building. For starters, it was a building in which people worked long hard hours on computer screens, yet the architects – award-winning, of course – provided it with glass walls which allowed the light to flood blindingly across the monitors. They had to provide hastily-designed, ugly roller-blinds. Those unlucky enough to sit near the huge glass walls got an idea of what life in a greenhouse would be like.

More to the point, in creating it the Northcliffe corporation – a conglomerate of provincial newspapers owned by Daily Mail and General Trust – had ordered the Morning News and Herald to leave their building in Plymouth city centre.

This old building had stood while bombs fell around it during the Plymouth blitz in World War Two. As the city burned, journalists and printers worked on, producing their papers for their people. When Plymouth was rebuilt after the war, the old Morning News and Herald building was left to stand at a drunken angle to the street, a symbol of those terrible yet valiant times. It’s still there today, occupied by Waterstone’s. Northcliffe treated this proud history, this powerful symbolism, this rare synergy of people and product, with utter, total contempt, and abandoned the city centre for their sparkly new glass ship on the outskirts.

Suddenly, we had shiny passes and barcodes to swipe against security gates; we had a bridge-type boardroom; we had management training courses and motivational events. But as the years went on, what we found we didn’t have so much of was readers, or employees.

£32million invested in the great glass ship came home to roost; the corporation panicked, headless-chicken style, in the face of the internet; cuts reduced quality reduced sales which led to cuts which reduced quality which reduced sales which led to cuts which reduced quality which reduced sales. The papers stopped printing in their home city; the printroom staff were made redundant and the press sold. Soon, advertising sales were outsourced and you placed your family announcements at a call centre. More and more journalists were made redundant. Now the building has been deserted even by its creators; the remaining staff produce the newspapers from a much smaller office.

A campaign has begun to preserve it as a piece of modernist architecture. This is ridiculous. It’s so successful a piece of architecture that it cannot fulfil the purpose for which it designed, and has not been able to attract any interest at all when offered for rent. Why preserve something that wasn’t very fit for purpose, and is a symbol of failure?

On the media website Hold The Front Page, I found a comment that perfectly summed up the place:

‘DGMT would love to get rid of this building, not only because the land is worth more without it but because on some subconscious level it probably realises that it symbolises the mentality of those who commissioned it – remote, elitist, pretentious, profligate and prizing style over substance – and thus stands as a monument to those who helped to wreck a reputable and responsible regional press and replace it with dirt-cheap digital trivia.

‘It should stay, at whatever cost to the shareholders, but not as a preserved and polished piece of Nineties kitsch; rather, let it rot slowly, like the careers of those it once housed and the lofty aspirations it was mean to represent.’

I agree with that beautifully written sentiment. The great glass ship should be left, as a monument to corporate hubris. As much as the newspapers’ old building symbolised community and service, the ship symbolises greed and empty commercialism.

It will never be a monument to the newspapers, of course: that still stands in the centre of Plymouth. I’m more proud than I can say to have worked there.

The ship? If it is demolished, I volunteer to be first to swing a hammer. But there’ll be a queue.