on my first whistle

When I was small and we went to Wales to visit my gran my sister and I would play a game with our cousins which essentially involved destroying bits of my gran's garden: the path was partially demarcated with concrete annuli, some of which had cracked and fallen to pieces, revealing the ring of wire at the centre of each object, by which they could be grasped and swung into others of their kind. I don't know who it was who started referring to them each as "Maggie Thatcher's Stone-Age Handbag" but that became their name.

It's fair to say that I got a head start in loathing Thatcher thanks to my dad, though his opinions seemed quite well-supported by things like lots of other people, Spitting Image, various radio comedy programmes and The Guardian. I was too young to have been subject to a change in governmental lactic munificence whilst I was at school but when I learnt about this it's hard to see it as particularly nice. Whilst I was quite small and well-protected for some of the worst bits of the eighties my junior conflation of callous, sneering politicians with All General Bad Guys has mostly simply been strengthened and confirmed and clarified by increasing age, knowledge, comprehension and such maturity as I can claim.

Even as I quickly skimmed down my Twitter timeline this morning to confirm the news (the first thing I saw was someone linking to isthatcherdeadyet.co.uk) I realised that the brief cathartic eruptions surrounding her death (and brief return to the fore of the news) would be of very little consequence compared to her effect and that there'd also be a fairly large amount of distastefully dishonest sycophancy from supporters, with accompanying wafts of admiration and unbalanced exultations of achievement. I had work to do so bent to that for the rest of the day (bar the odd check of the news to see what the internet's tone was turning out to be, who would come up with the best lines and if anyone would remember Steve Nallon) but returned to think of it as I headed out of the building into the sunshine to ride home; it was a nice day, not quite yet sunny enough to be sunburny and cold enough to be able to exert without immediately becoming horribly sweaty, but I still managed to encounter the active transport equivalent of Thatcherism in the form of the arsewits who felt it more important to try and overtake or otherwise ride two abreast as they passed pedestrians when there were other cyclists approaching from the other direction on the non-pedestrianated side of the path rather than just wait a few moments or temporarily go to single-file. Being a selfish bastard is unfortunately still not very far beneath the surface in some people, despite the fact that this whole civilisation thing we're supposed to form part of being essentially about not being a selfish bastard. It's when someone comes along and publicly and ostentatiously encourages mass selfish bastardism as a lifestyle paradigm in those so inclined that our world slips back a few notches.

That aside, I was saved from having to try and find something appropriate to photograph by having a pre-existing appointment to deliver and donate our old microwave to one of Nicky's colleagues, for which the front rack on the sparebike was the ideal size.