Like marker buoys on the course of a ship, the traditional events of the year seem to slip past so quickly.

It only feels like five minutes since Take That Unwanted Teddy Bear To The Charity Shop Day (February 15).

Yet here we are, almost at the Festival of Pointing Out To Permanently Outraged People That Those Chocolate Eggs Didn’t Have The Word ’Easter’ Printed On Them In The Sixties And Seventies Either.

The highlight of last week’s calendar was International Women’s Day, a celebration of how much has been achieved in gender equality and a reminder of how much there is still left to do.

(If I might pre-empt a question; yes, there’s an International Men’s Day. It’s November 19. It’s been in place since 1992.)

So to mark what the bloggers are calling #IWD18, I thought I’d pay a little tribute to....um.....a bloke.

If you’ll permit me a brief bit of mansplaining...

The Isle of Man is justifiably proud of being the first country in the world to introduce votes for women, in 1881.

The struggle to have this freedom given in the United Kingdom is well-documented, with (half-Manx on her mother’s side) Emmeline Pankhurst a major historical figure.

The campaign over here is less famous, but somebody had to blaze a trail.

With an all-male House of Keys voted into office by an all-male electorate, and nowhere else in the world practising it, female suffrage can’t have been seen as an obvious vote-winner at the time.

In spite of this, Richard Sherwood, MHK for Glenfaba (pictured below), championed the cause and persuaded his fellow members of the Tynwald Boys’ Club to vote for that pioneering change.

There’s a rather grand marble bust of Richard Sherwood in Douglas town hall.

The sculptor has done a great job of capturing his magnificently nineteenth-century facial hair.

Sherwood died young and tragically, only two years after Manx women first gained the vote.

If you could tell him that by the simple act of speaking up for what’s right and fair, he set in motion a chain of events that would improve the lives of women all over the world, that big beard would probably stand on end in surprise.

Nevertheless, it’s true.

If I had a grand 1881-style hat, I would doff it to Richard Sherwood, the Glenfaba reformer.