This film is not for spurning.

Having missed it in the cinema, I have just watched 'The Iron Lady'.

Meryl Streep is absolutely - no, COMPSOGNATHEOUSLY - brilliant: what an actress, whose every tic, stoop and intonation so bit home that by the end of it I couldn't remember what Margaret Thatcher looked like or where the hell I’d been at the time.

More than anything there was - for me - a gradual realisation that she lived - no, survived - a life more ordinary for over twice the length of time she spent in power. If I'm right that puts her second only to Sir Paul McCartney and leaves Nelson Mandela still in his blocks.

I liked the neat opening scene in which "the milk snatcher", having eluded her captors, complains about the high price of that essential calcareous bovine nutrient: 49p a pint - and from a corner shop too! For once she should have followed her own advice instead of her father's and shopped at Tesco's.

But why did the Falklands war occur after the miners' strike? Where was Europe and all who sank in her (mostly over here)? Where Westland? And why was Heseltine played by Richard E. Grant, who only ever convincingly plays Richard E. Grant? Where were Tebbit and Lawson, Big Bang and Gorbachev?  Could Reagan do nothing more than dance? (OK, don't answer that one.)

And above all, why the leap from 1984 to 1990 – and with no mention of the World Snooker Final between that other Dennis, Taylor, and Steve Davis?

I think she'll be back.

 

Are we there yet?

There was an interesting question from Jan Greenwood on Facebook today: "Is it reasonable to assume that all-year Christmas shops don't have after-Christmas sales?"

The answer - as all-year Christmas shops are good enough to be open about - is that there's no 'after-Christmas' any more. Like children, but with fewer grounds for it, we live in a perpetual state of pre-things.

Unlike children, we are encouraged to do so, and it must be said that we respond magnificently and above all with great financial generosity.

For example, it is now the pre-Valentine's Day period. When that's over, although Easter eggs will already have been in the shops for a fortnight or so, we will be pre-Easter, then warming up during the pre-Summer Holiday period, pre-Hallowe'en before the tan has faded, pre-Bonfire Night, with fireworks a fortnight either side of November 5th, and finally (except it isn't) and with barely enough time to catch an autumn chill, pre-Christmas again.

The only thing we prefer not to be thought of as pre- is the one thing all of us are, and that's death, which only those we leave behind are authorised to celebrate - in the nicest possible way of course.

Consume and Live

Charity shops are the answer to middle class moral agonies about obsessive consumption: I get to indulge myself at minimal cost while kidding you I’m thinking of others. (And kidding myself: when deceiving people it always goes so much better on the conscience if you bamboozle yourself first - in fact, that's the main difference between theologians and politicians.)  And of course charities get the money and the high-street, supermarket and internet chains don’t. Then, instead of feeling guilty when I get home I can look down on everyone else. It doesn’t get better than that.

These are just some of my purchases since Christmas:

Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Slaughterhouse 5’ will cost you £7.99 in Waterstone’s but I parted with just £1 in Age Concern, Chalfont St Peter. OK, less than half a lateral inch on the bookshelf  but an eighth of the price in the wild and, being second-hand, it will look to others like you’ve actually read it.

A used set of a rare Marx Brothers 6-DVD boxed collection is £54 plus P&P on Amazon, but I saw just £25 Go West in The Hospice Shop, Gerrards Cross.

A Paul Smith shirt that looks like a tube of Refreshers would have cost me an arm and a leg at £125 from the eponymous retail outlet - which, incidentally, rather defeats the point of buying it in the first place - but I secured it for the mere toenail clipping of £5 from Cancer Research in Beaconsfield, and with not a soup stain to be seen.

I wouldn’t be seen dead wearing it, but you know what I mean.