Bondie
female, 50 |
Secret Agent
Stafford / UK
member since 13.06.2011
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Certain documents relating to Margaret Thatcher’s time in office have been kept filed away in a cabinet for over twenty years. ‘The Iron Filings’ – named after the Lady herself- have been released only today, and will no doubt ignite sparklers across Westminster. They reveal much that was previously only hinted at; most of what we know had been spun so finely from the spinnerets (arseholes) of doctors that it was mere glinting gossamer of shimmering half truth.
Most people believe that Margaret was dubbed ‘The Iron Lady’ because of her unbending nature, and there is indeed some truth in this. For example, at one Tory Dinner Dance in the 80s, she and the cabinet were having a laugh. Some of them had been having food fights and ripping the fittings out of the gents’ loos. Leon the Brittan (he was a bit like our version of Asterix the Gaul, but not in tights) grabbed a toilet seat that Heseltine had been messing with, stuck his rubbery face through it, and contorted it into something wildly comical, daring others –including Margaret – to do the same. She, however, was resolute: ‘The lady’s not for gurning,’ she intoned, and this became a much misquoted representation of her steadfast, ferrous qualities.
In fact, Margaret just liked iron. Nobody really knows why. Maybe it was living through the post-war years when the only resistant material available was Bakelite, but that woman loved iron. She insisted that windows of Number 10 be hung with iron curtains. When the television people wanted to do an ‘at home with Maggie’ featurette, she agreed, but demanded they film her doing the ironing. It’s a lovely piece, by the way, showing a softer, maternal side to The Iron Duke. In the background, little Mark Thatcher can be seen offering water pistols and spud guns to a group of toy soldiers whilst shoving wads of Monopoly money into the pockets of his shorts; in another clip, a young Carol sits at the kitchen table, eating kangaroo balls. Later, Mark goes into the garden and is lost for some time. And Margaret is ironing and ironing and ironing. She loved iron that much. She hated steel, though.
It was this occasional smelting that endeared her so much to other heads of state. They liked her soft voice, her bouffant hair, itself like a little cloud of iron shards dancing around the great magnet of her head. They often referred to a meeting with Margaret as ‘The Iron Fisting in the Velvet Glove.’ They weren’t always using a metaphor. Some say that when she opened her mouth a molten stream would spew out, like lava, only made out of iron. This is probably a myth, dating back to that time in the 70s when she was adamant that nobody in the country should have milk because it was turning us all into milksops, and she went around sucking it all up, especially that of human kindness. It was far too much for her to consume, so most of it she just spat out again. By the 80s, this ‘milk snatching’ was largely forgotten, but at one time she is rumoured to have crept around the fields at night, suckling every teat, dug and udder until it was a flaccid, useless flap of skin.
But she also supplied us with many benefits. Every time you walk into a branch of ‘News & Cigs’, cast your glance upwards. Looking down at you from the display shelves will be several arresting images of Sharon from ‘Eastenders’, her hatchet-faced, reproachful glare following you around the store. Without Maggie, we would not have such erudite publications as ‘TV Quick’, ‘What’s on TV’ and ‘Inside Soap’.
We all remember the uproar surrounding the ‘Pole Tax’. In the 1980s, nearly every household in England owned at least one pole, usually a ten footer. They were used for touching unpleasant things, things that you would scarcely even like to touch with a ten-foot pole. Realising that taxing these common items would generate revenue for the treasury, Margaret seized the day. There were riots across the land, mostly amongst those for whom poles were a tool of the trade, plate spinners and bargees. This proved such an embarrassment to the Premier that she backed down, claiming that her secretary (probably Geoffrey Howe or someone, because he was apparently foreign anyway and likely couldn’t spell English words) had mistyped ‘poll’ as ‘pole’. After that, nobody minded, except a handful of Scottish people. To make it easier for her foreign secretary, she changed its name to the ‘Community Charge’, but even this was ballsed up a bit when the next memo had it misprinted as the ‘Commune Charge’. It ended up only being levied on a few hippies in places like Findhorn.
This really was the beginning of the end for Margaret, the Iron Giant. But we should not forget her legacy. When you walk through the scarred Mercian and Northern swathes of this country, be careful not to venture too far from trodden ways. Make sure that you can see at least one Starbucks at all times, for out there, in the wilds, lurks the fallout. In the dales and the fells where once the coal was hewn, monsters have spawned. Put your ear to the ground, and listen; the thrumming of the earth is not the underground Virgin cables transmitting unlimited broadband to your home; the faint stirring of the air that lifts your toupee is not a breeze from the wind farm on the hill. No. It is the ponies, the pit ponies, advancing, a great Lawrentian herd of them, evolved into fierce, vengeful beasts. Flee! And then, if a shadow shifts across the grass, take cover, lest a Hitchcockian flock of redundant pit canaries comes to slake its ire by pecking out your eyes. And behind them all, the ghost of a man, smeared in black dust, a spectral glow shining from his head, stripped to the waist and rising from a tin bath, smelling of chrysanthemums, casts an anthracitic shadow… |
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