I was up bright and early this morning to begin my journey Up North. Team WEP Bath, all six of us, were taking the train up to Manchester. The journey was blessedly uneventful, despite a tree on the track near Plymouth earlier in the morning, and there was plenty of room on the train.

The conference venue is the Victoria Warehouse in Trafford Park. There’s a big sports stadium just down the road and lots of things are painted red. I gather that some sort of soccerball thing is happening on Sunday evening, but right now the area is given over entirely to a bunch of feisty feminists.

The Warehouse has a brickwork and steel girder aesthetic, by which I mean that the bare minimum of renovation has been done. It works well enough as a venue, however, and parts of it have a pleasantly steampunk feel to them. The street food is good and reasonably priced. The bar is crap and over-priced. As conference venues go, that’s not bad.

The main event of the day was the opening ceremonies in the evening. There were speeches from various people who would be Party Grandees if we had been a party long enough for anyone to become Grand. Sandi Toksvig, of course, will never be Grand, she’s far too irreverent for that. However, there are definite advantages to having a senior party member who is also an accomplished comedian used to doing stand-up shows.

Having said that, my favorite performance of the evening was from poet, Justina Kehinde. She made an impassioned plea for exactly the sort of intersectional feminism that I want to see from WEP. The other speeches mostly backed her up, though they all failed to use the word intersectionality.

After the official speeches the party management opened up the floor to contributions. I was interested to see how this went, and a little worried that people might try to talk back against the inclusive nature of the opening speeches. The first speaker was anti sex work, which worried me further. Thankfully most of the other people who got up were just so happy to be there, and to have a political party that addressed their concerns, that they were not interested in trying to steer policy.

Team Bath was very proud of Emily, our young social media guru, who got up and talked about the pressure put on young women in social life at universities.

I didn’t have a lot to do today, other than say hi to various people. I found the Bristol branch, who have 19 members here. I also caught up with Stella Duffy whom I haven’t seen in ages. Sadly we are scheduled against each other tomorrow. Jack Munroe doesn’t appear to be here yet, but I am very much looking forward to their talk tomorrow.

The membership is very white, but not exclusively so. There were two women of colour officially on platform today, and at least three more who spoke in the open mic. There is a nice mix of ages, and of gender presentations. There are even a few men, because party membership is open to everyone.

Tomorrow I have workshops to deliver, so if you’ll excuse me I am going to rehearse once more.