An asteroid has struck. It has the potential to detonate the apparently eternal equation between childcare and no-pay or low-pay.
The astronomical event is an equal pay case in a modest market town on the Borders. Everyone knows Carlisle, like Crewe, as a station stop. Now Carlisle is a name that arouses awe and shock among anyone interested in women's pay.
North Cumbria Acute NHS Trust is still digesting the mighty implications of a dogged case brought by the local Unison branch on behalf of women workers. Not only did the women win, but they won back pay, a recognition of historic injustice.
The Carlisle case will be a catalyst. Before this test case finally came to an industrial tribunal, nursery workers' strikes in Scotland confronted employers who had been dithering at best, doing nothing at worst, with the implications of their own inertia. They were warned by the Equal Opportunities Commission in Scotland that the strikes could have been averted if they had addressed equal pay.
For years, equal pay has been rolling around the floor, like dough, gathering dust and getting dirty.
But there is new energy around. The Scottish nursery strikes shook the institutions. The Carlisle case defied the tendency to throw implementation of equal pay into the long grass of endless negotiation, in which men's historic privilege is re- instated. And in the north-east of England, employers and unions are being challenged by maverick no-win no-fee litigation on behalf of hundreds of women.
The challenge of Carlisle is that women have won on a massive scale, with huge implications not only for grading, and pay, but pensions, back pay and compensation.
Of course, there is the lament that the employers, and society, can't afford it. But these cases are exposing just how much money is being taken from women by both providers and parents.
Women's pay is poor not so much because they do women's jobs, as because it is women's pay. Decades after the concept of pin money was wiped off our lips, women are still paid pin money.
Defensive fortifications will be mobilised, make no mistake, but there is the potential - with political will and wit - for a revolution in the value attached to women's work.
