The Shape of Things To Come

Crash! After the party comes the morning after. As predicted the emotions are now spent, the old wounds probed and now here we are in the cold hard dawn of the present. Next week they will bury the architect of our present prison with much pomp and circumstance. The troops will line the streets of London giving full military honours to someone who's only connection with warfare was ordering soldiers and sailors to the blood drenched Falklands, well that and spending the rest of her life posing on tanks at every opportunity. The pros and cons of that war are for another time, the point I want to make is about the ceremony that followed it. There was much pomp and circumstance then too and Maggie was in the centre of it all as she will be next week but there were others present too, they hadn't been invited, in fact they had been rather pointedly excluded, but they came anyway and so they were grudgingly admitted and quietly hidden behind a pillar - the casualties of that war, as unwelcome as Banquo's ghost at the feast. That refusal of Thatchers to let the human cost intrude on her victory parade is the measure of the woman, they were an inconvenient truth and she apparently felt nothing for them, wanted them forgotten, brushed under the carpet. They were young men, on average what 19 to 22 years old? Something like that - about the age of her own children, my age at the time - but they were irrelevant to her. The same was true of the people who's lives she crushed with her social policies, they were, to borrow one of her chancellors' phrases, "a price worth paying. It's a callous characteristic and one that to some extent her hero Churchill shared (if anyone takes exception to that I would advise them to read up on Gallipoli and his actions during the General Strike). She wanted desperately to be seen in his mould, to emulate him - well next week she'll get her wish when she is strapped to a gun carriage and paraded from Westminster to St Paul's as he was 54 years ago, pity she won't be around to enjoy it. Afterwards they are going to cremate her - let's hope they can find enough coal for the fire.

The uninvited, and inconvenient, guest next week will be the people of this country who still bear the scars of her years at No. 10. They will be out in the streets; not in the crowd who will line the procession route and who will no doubt wave their little Union Jacks and cry into their copies of the Daily Mail, but I cannot believe they will not be in other streets nearby. I doubt very much whether they will sit quietly behind a pillar as the Falklands wounded did. I will be very surprised if they don't make quite an effort to be noticed. I hope next week will be peaceful but I fear it will be very, very ugly.



I occupied myself this afternoon with my second attempt at needle felting, this time actually having some concept of what I was making. I'm not too unhappy with it but I couldn't get the likeness I was aiming for....that of a certain Spitting Image doll that anyone alive back then will remember. Instead it insisted on resembling another very strong woman who influenced my life in the 1980's, my boss and PhD supervisor Anne Maclaren, so I turned it into a caricature of her. She was an extraordinary woman, a great scientist, a child of wealth and privilege, and a lifelong communist (God Bless Her) - never without a copy of Socialist Worker to try and sell you. Like most strong, rather extraordinary people she could be a pain in the arse at times but I find I increasingly look back on her with affection. She was a notoriously bad, reckless and fast driver. Once when giving me a lift back to my flat she very nearly killed us half a dozen times on the 3 or 4 mile trip through Camden and after we skidded to a halt in a blue cloud of brake dust and burnt rubber I sat very still in the passengers seat showing no sign of getting out, "We're here.", she said eventually, to which I shakily replied "I know, but I'm not sure I can stand up just yet". It came as no surprise to hear about six years ago that she had finally fulfilled everyone's prophecy and crashed, killing herself and the love of her life Donald Michie. Like Margaret Thatcher she was one of the first women to break into corners reserved for men and rise to great heights and like Thatcher she left a considerable legacy, in her case it was a far more admirable one. Not a bad way to exit life either: a sudden high speed crash in the course of an active life at age 80, there are worse ways to die...as Maggie Thatcher found out. It was seeing Anne in this sculpture today that set me off on the little stream of consciousness above: when she was 12 she appeared in the H G Wells film The Shape of Things to Come, if you watch it she's the unnamed but reasonably significant little girl towards the end of the movie acting opposite Raymond Massey - things like that just seemed to happen to Anne! Anyway it set me thinking about the uncertainty of what we can expect in our future, are the stirrings of the Old Left that we've seen this week a sign of resurgence? Can we harness this momentum and roll back the right wing tide of the last 30 years? I'm not optimistic but there are noises that make me think my generation are beginning to get off their knees again and the generation that has known no other world surely can't be pushed much further without the worm turning. Thatchers death and funeral are the closing of an old chapter, its time to take Shakespeare's advice, "What's past is prologue".