Maggie



It’s a historic day today, but Perran and Carenza are in school, instead of in London, bearing witness to Margaret Thatcher’s very expensive funeral.  The only thing that makes me doubt the wisdom of this is that I run an oral history group for the elderly and their accounts are much more pungent for being eye-witness.  They recall cycling with red white and blue ribbons streaming out behind them on VE Day, sleeping on pavements before the coronation parade, making friends with strangers on the street at a royal wedding.   Magical.

As a non-royalist (not quite as vehement as an anti-royalist), I haven’t attended any of the weddings, funerals, jubilees in London, although we did once take my mother-in-law to London for a birthday day out and were surprised when they trooped the colour for her and the red arrows gave her a fly-past.  It turned out it was also the Queen’s eightieth birthday.

Maybe, we’ll just have to make it a historic day at home.  Over dinner, I shall advise my offspring that the people who are shaking their fists at a shrivelled dead woman in a coffin are wasting their energy – instead they should be genning up on the policies they want enacted today, signing up to the appropriate political/pressure/religious bodies, and lobbying, campaigning and canvassing like mad to make this country a better place for my grandchildren.