Margaret Thatcher

Prologues.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

(Because this is me, there is another prologue before this section).

Where to start, in terms of family life and culture? Or maybe specifically music? And how to know when awarenesses became so developed, or grief, shock or hormones took over so completely that the whole of my life became about defiance. Because I think maybe it did. And this feeds in to everything.

Defy the shock of people dying. Then before you know it defy the evil that was Thatcher. Wade in there. Defy the bigotry and prejudice criminally at large and *in some way* oppose the privilege. All this in a teen rage. Then live up to those who came before, whilst knowing they were different – maybe simpler, better – and that things don’t or can’t work like that. But let them still be your gods.

Don’t fer Christ’s sake out yourself as such – faaar too pretentious, far too self-righteous! – but absolutely be a protest singer. Be the inevitable mad mixture that you feel; of hard, deep thinker and honest force. Be immune to judgements from outside; be fearless and pour the good energy in. Time will or may come when you can be more accepting. For now, trust and work and be conscious. These things have value.

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The moment is everything: accident-of-birth catapulting me simultaneously into a hormone-fest and Anarchy in the UK meant this particular youth was inevitably a Child of That Time. Driven or pumped. Scarred, maybe. Furious, definitely; judgmental definitely. Carrying a load, probably.[1] Deeply lost but as deeply certain as most teens – yes? – that he would do things in enflamed opposition to the pitiful acquiescence that was Normal Life. So yeh, off-the-scale indulgent in some respects but also having a kind of rebellious integrity.

People died on us and I‘m not going to tell their stories here. There’s enough of that in the previous books. You just need to register the possibility that maybe everything Yours F Truly does is a kind of amorphous, inadequate, politicised homage to three great ‘ordinary’ blokes. This is not to say that I am a hugely party-political animal, or that I under-appreciate the Walton Women: but it rightly implies that I’m on a permanent slow-burn around how the world just ain’t good enough, in a way that those better men simply weren’t.

There’s generational stuff in play here, because a) life was simpler and b) in some senses it was less aware. Folks just didn’t know or couldn’t know the world, its peoples and its foibles in the way we can now. (Not that this makes us any more educated). Plus sentiment. I may gush, or goddammit not be able to see[2], or drown us in the kind of emotive slippage we’re all prone to. This is what love does: this is what age does.

I may never know if these old guys were just wiser, apparently swerving the day-to-day cataclysms that eat away at me/you/us, but however dubiously old-school it may sound, here’s my daft Braveheart moment: *raises fist*.

I am proud to be of them. Always, I will love, revere and follow them, or try to, for their invincible (yes) and endless (yes it was!) honesty and humility. They are recalled in the hope that we can all, in the modern idiom, stand on their elephantine shoulders.

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I guess the thing that stirs me the most is the urgent need to change the universe. And that really may be a direct result of punk and Margaret Thatcher.

Bit loathe to put dates into this baby but it may be inescapable. Absolutely not telling you freeloaders my birth date – not until we’re mates and you’ve proved you’re worth it – but suppose I can offer the rough figuration that I was a furious and pyrotechnically hormonal late-teen when the over-combed one began to preen through and over our lives. She, and Rotten’s voice, and Strummer’s heart, and Costello’s lyrics and my father’s death were the things that made me. They were contingent and co-forming energies that powered and power me towards trying, at the very least, to live a life that opposes.

This book, the third part (so far) in my #lolsobiography, is inevitably about that. But it’s also about sport, about influence, about how wonderful things are, even when darkness and dumbness and the twisted evils of money and privilege continue to pin us to the deck. My faith in art and music and sport never dims. My faith in the Three Great Mates we all have and need and my two sensational kids carries me through. 

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Life seems to have conspired towards poles of opinion, not just on social media but that might be the most obvious example. Too many of us make judgements that are ill thought-out or unforgiving. We’re bawling our truths at each other. We exercise (or exorcise?) a kind of manic certainty that draws us into conflict rather than conversation. Everything from the Twitters[3] to PMQs contributes to this.

Let me put on record my own weakness in this regard: I get angry and I judge. But in my heart I know that tolerance – and knowing that you may be wrong – are essential human virtues. We do have to judge; we do have to decide; we do need to get better but we also need to be civil. That’s not a recipe for capitulation.

*Takes further deep breath*. Look I’m as ready as the next bloke to launch into Grandstanding Mode. The Times and the Socials and everything about now make GM the engaged individual’s ‘natural’ response, do they not? Us punters are being teased towards some angry vortex all the time. Ah: cue some polar expeditionism.

We live, it strikes me, in an extraordinary and dangerous moment. The West is arguably madder than it’s ever been, with the Trump/Musk coalition-thing a catastrophic threat to the intelligence, knowledge and goodness that underpins society itself. (It’s November 2024 as I write: we await the second Trump term but Brother Elon has sculpted the matrix into an angry monster). The truth has suffered an especially foul Special Op’[4] – Bannon’s infamous shitstorm. Those previously relatively harmless Influencers (think makeovers, think pranksters, posers and dancers) have morphed into combat-ready sub-nazis.

This is a challenge. It can drag us down and have us raging at (and waaay beyond) the deliberately-reduced politics we now suffer in the West.

So don’t expect me to qualify everything – I may fall short! I know we’re well-advised to avoid cheap blame-games but I’m still gonna launch, here and there. Of course under-privileged and under-educated people have always been likely to ‘strike out’. Of course this general discontent has always been weaponized by people with hands on the levers. But there are lines we just don’t cross; there are things which are just plain wrong.

The Great Families and the oligarchs; the MAGA cult and the ‘gammon’; the liars and the cheats and the racists are bad folks.[5] Some more, some less. We who feel this may be entitled to tell them that, although this is likely to be inflammatory. ‘We see you’. But we also have to deal with them – by that, I mean debate, include, educate – however difficult or unlikely that may seem. And, perhaps before we inter-react, or rise to condemn, or commit the sin of prejudice ourselves, we have to go big and go public on the idea that they, these people, are as valuable as we are. They have our right to argue.

It may not get much tougher than to accept that the ‘racist morons’ or ‘easily-led’ on our streets or in our timelines are people we have to appreciate but… we do. Whilst opposing them.

Where lies progress in all this? On a political level I suppose we need to elect governments that will be a) strong enough morally to oppose prejudice and b) smart enough economically to improve the lot of the disaffected. Clearly, sadly, the momentum appears to be going the other way in certain key democracies.

This brings us back into the circle of action, or exasperation. There is a kind of backstop, a point of no further retreat for many of us. Prejudice and privilege are wrong. Whether entitled or powerless, ignorant or driven, player or played, they are wrong. We can and should choose to do better around those things – we surely have to? This implies all kinds of stuff but let’s just call it goodness. Most of us recognize it, even if we choose not to ‘walk in its path’. There are a million distractions, some gorgeous, some filthy. We need to be decent and fair and friendly; to find the invincibly moral core. That can be common; can define us.

But hang on. In the face of Trumpism and Reform, alt-rightism and this galaxy of loss, what’s our civil/intellectual/physical/cultural reaction? Depends who we are. Are we leaders or passengers or artists or victims? Who do we look to, where do we go? Weirdly, it seems a scientific certainty that there will be a response, even in this turbulent evil. (Is that not how the universe works?) The response may even be a thing of glory and inspiration.

Wonderfully, we make our statements in a myriad of ways. As the mighty Slits did, we can ‘create’; kick up a fuss; make something challenging and radical and beautiful. We may need to do more, but this is part of the change – or at least one irrepressibly human, principal means to strike back. Let’s create. Let’s be anti-badness; anti-racist; anti- any declining status quo. Our pens are ‘snug as a gun’.[6] Our fingers are on the fretboard. This is part of life’s purpose.

[1] Went to see some weirdo, many years later, after a heart episode. He looked at me and immediately asked why I was carrying the world’s troubles. ‘I’m seeing a yolk across your shoulders’.

[2] Yup. Definitely prone to welling-up.

[3] Yeh I know, now X. Pipe down!!

[4] Deliberate perversion of things we thought were fixed and factual. Facilitated by socials/moguls/what we might call the Extremist Establishment.

[5] Read on before you judge…

[6] Slits: ‘Typical Girls’, from ‘Cut’. Seamus Heaney: ‘Digging’.

Stand Down Margaret.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ 2 Comments

So she finally did step down from that jewel-encrusted carriage; her head dizzy with accolades, with glorious confusion, the baying crowd perceived as purring kittens to her leonine, English majesty. She descended smoothly, unaided, to some lavender field – it should be stiff with barley? – in that singing niche of her memory that for her, forever, might be if not Ingerland, then Grantham. And as she walks, from that shop, from that street, into the butter-cupped facsimile of that rural idyll, the parting crops do then draw up to attention… and the birds stop… and the limp sun stills above the willow. Because (she thinks, or somebody thinks) something major has happened.

And maybe it has – unless I dreamed it? Maybe there was an event as well as a death. Maybe we have to concede that? And then… in what way do we rejoice?

A rake of us – a simmering multitude with every bit as much gumption and fight and ‘conviction’ as she – many of us recoil from both that faux English idyll and the idolatry, the (in our view) slightly weird, slightly perverse adulation for this woman. A woman we link to some blanched – or maybe that should be scorched? – Englishness. A brutalist and therefore hugely uncultured (opposite of) outlook. A leadenness too; dull and grey and introspective in the worst of ways – bigoted, actually – reeking memorably of contempt for the most fundamental human rights in say… South Africa, as though Apartheid itself was some acceptable province of this Way We Were nation. (Mrs Thatcher, remember, led when it came to propping up the dying racist regime in the pre-rainbow nation. Should we celebrate the memory of that, I wonder?)

Even those of us who happen to be blokes, who think it was kindof great that a woman got to be PM are denied the possibility of respecting this woman. Most of us knew already, pre the coiffured barnet, accent and manner that Thatcher’s obvious bitterness, that vile and one-dimensional and utterly hypocritical (no apology for labouring this one!) ‘conviction’ against the trackie-wearing classes, The Immigrants and The Homosexuals would make many of us squirm with shame or rage. The fact that she blew a historic opportunity for Britwomankind by being an utter and malevolent donkey in the role of PM has almost passed us by, such was the magnitude of her dislocating pomp.

She was sexless and yet quasi-regal, love-fodder for the dumb fawners and the prejudiced. The Mail invented her surely – she must have been pressed out of a centre-page special entitled Ideal Dictators? I can’t explain her any other way. The thought of her (and I know it ain’t jus’ me because we’ve been talking, right?) simply does my head in.

She got at us personally, I suppose, one way or another. In my case, we were yeh… close. Having been born and spent the first twenty-odd years of my life in Grimsby, I moved to London to work as a photographer’s assistant in what is atmospherically describable as The Thatcher Era. I had no money and shared a room in a rundown, terraced housing association gaff with one of my brothers. Hilgrove Road. It was great yet completely crappy in a way that we didn’t mind but that made parental visits unthinkable. Stepping outside the door though and walking the couple of hundred yards up to Swiss Cottage was a revelation to this particular smalltown boy. I had never really seen posh motors – Porsches, Jaguars, Rolls Royces – down here it was crawling with them. How did that work?

Now I know this car thing may not stand up as anything other than duff anecdotal opinion but it had real meaning for me, it was true – it became truer, in fact – that there was money here in a way that had never remotely been suggested Up North. Moreover as this admittedly crass osmosis of the divisive character of Elite Southness became better enriched by my experience/observation, so my political and I think philosophical oeuvre cobbled itself together; directed (if cobbling can be directed?) by Thatcherism. It became obvious that the most humungously cynical fix was going on; put simply, that the Tories were fixing it for The South. Because it didn’t matter in terms of votes or constituencies or voices how much mithering The North got up to… the South, under Thatcher won out. A massive and indeed overwhelming number of safe Tory seats in the London area effectively farted in the face of the rest.

We all knew that was what was going on. Politicking of the rawest and most unsophisticated kind. Parliament entrapped. Toffs and Tories flicking a superior brand of the V’s, whilst busloads of Home Counties-returning coppers flashed their wage packets at incandescent miners. It was deeply ugly; a legacy I was reminded of last night when a friend, having howled when the subject turned to a possible State Funeral, suggested a burial more appropriate, in her view.

Sling the old witch down a fackin’ mine-shaft. (And yes, for the record, my friend is an Essex girl. And yes, she would be right in wanting me to point out that I AM AWARE poverty and discrimination existed in the South too during this period but I stand by my identification of a very real North-South divide – construct or function though that may have been of a regional and possibly parochial standpoint. And she is with me and I am with her on the notion that Thatcher quite deliberately set us against each other… and incidentally, what does that remind you of?)

Recently (and here I’m not speaking of any reactions to the death – I’m avoiding media on the subject pretty entirely) there appears a rather sickening fashion for appreciating Mrs T’s determination and commitment to things she believed in. I’m not having that. Why credit the prejudices, the immoralities in fact, of a world leader in bulldozing folks apart? My most crucially politically-formative years were spent in a great city-state which barely acknowledged the existence of Another Country out there. Or more exactly knew all about it but didn’t give a toss. Because an allegedly strong woman was making allegedly tough decisions. I came to see her then and over time as a shrill weakling; a brittle, thin-blooded creature who plastered on thick the slap of bravery and ‘conviction’. I never believed a word – and I still don’t.