Men used to go fishing when they wanted to get away from 'the wife' and swap smutty jokes. Now they take up blogging.

-- A couple of months ago, an American robin, Turdus migratorius, made it across the Atlantic. News reports showed a long row of birdwatchers, waiting, with the utmost patience, by a garden wall in Peckham, London. Almost all of them were men. I wondered, at the time, if this - minus binoculars - is what a reception party of bloggers would look like. Now, thanks to the drafters of the Euston Manifesto, a pub-born project that has just launched as a real-life political alliance, the question has been answered. It is, indeed, what a reception party of bloggers would look like.

Photographs of the Manifesto's launch in Islington last week depict rows of men being addressed by four men and one woman. It is true that Eve Garrard had a place on the podium, along with fellow Euston dignitaries, discussing egalitarianism and progressive thinking and exporting democracy. And there were some women organisers, and some more women no doubt fulfilling a virile injunction from the podium to drink the bar dry. The drafters and drinkers responsible for the Euston Manifesto do not, like the Masons, prohibit women from membership. And even the Masons once admitted a woman after she was discovered spying on a ceremony through a gap in a wall. --