Mrs Thatcher

I am Thatchurated: the Telegraph is full of her, the Times too; every where I look I see her face, young, middle-aged, old. Thatcherated, up to here (a point above my head) fed up with it all, the tributes, the what-a-wonderful-woman encomiums.
Mrs Thatcher was not a likeable woman. She was a sort of  female machine, a robotic creature with certain missions in her head and nothing was going to stop her seeing them through. Nothing: not miners and their families, not her colleagues who probably despised her as much as she despised them; not anyone daft enough to disagree with her - because she was right and everyone else who didn't agree with her was wrong. She could not compromise on anything because she was always right and they were wrong. She had no feeling for people, no empathy. At times she seemed to sympathise with ordinary people but this was always over trivial matters.
But she got certain things done for which we have to be grateful: she took on the unions which were just about getting completely out of control and won so that they became a spent force politically. She fought a war with a dictator who'd have over-run The Falklands and probably kicked the British out of there. And she helped Reagan bring down Communist Russia which I once believed would last for ever.
But she did all these things with a coldness that was as unfeeling as a boa constrictor.
Many feel she wrecked industry in this country, leaving parts of the North of England destitude.
She ordered the sinking of the Belgrano with all those young men on board. Maybe that was a turning point in the war but, I believe, she felt no remorse.
The odd thing is that while I dislike the woman I feel that she may have saved the country from open revolution - I believe it had got to that point when she became Prime Minister and I don't believe there was anyone else capable of facing up to it.

Rebecca West

There is a new biography published about Rebecca West. I can't imagine many people wanting to read it since Rebecca West is not well known these days. I know a few small things about her: she wrote a famous report of The Nuremberg Trials of the Nazi war criminals; she had a long affair with H.G.Wells in her twenties (when she was a "new" woman in the style and manners of a Shaw heroine - though her name Rebecca West is a pseudonym and is taken from Rosmersolm by Ibsen) from which resulted a son whom she neglected and who, in turn, got to hate her; she wrote many novels none of which are read now (I guess); I once read one of her novels, "There is no Conversation", and thought it pretty dreadful.
I do recall this very intelligent oldish woman on TV a long time ago, in The Brains Trust I believe, a formidable lady, tweedy in costume, informing us that she knew how Bernard Shaw had come to write his play "Saint Joan"; she maintained that Shaw's wife left books about Joan littered around the house, Shaw kept picking them up and glancing at them etc etc. Eureka! Shaw writes "St Joan". I only half believed it.

Thrush

I have not seen a thrush in our garden for about eight years; today I saw one, a rather large, stout one that stood on the top of a hedge for some twenty seconds. He (or she) looked as if it was studying something, it had an almost serious expression on its face. Heaps of speckles on its chest.
There used to be heaps of them in our garden eight or so years ago. They ate all the red currants which I couldn't bother to cover - anyway they probably enjoyed them more than I would have because I never knew what to with red currants except make jam out of them and that's a tedious job which, in my case, always resulted in disaster - too soft, too hard, too something.
Then, suddenly, the next season there were none. But there were, and are, plenty of magpies. If they don't eat chicks they certainly eat eggs; so they probably ate all the young thrushes and none came back. Until now.
Welcome wise thrush which sings his song twice over..... Hah yes:

"Hark! where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops - at the bent spray's edge -
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never would recapture
The first, fine careless rapture!"