Me and the boy...

An online chum asked for a piccie of Henry and me. As I was recovering from this unimaginable second bout of chicken pox in my life, we went for a walk in the park yesterday. SWMBO took the picture on my iPhone.

It is, of course, behind the cut.

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I am old and grey. Henry is young and happy. This is as it should be, I suppose.

Well the poor old woman has died...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22067155#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/ufa0I0etW4A/margaret-thatcher-dies-aged-87

There was a time when I was perfectly sure I'd be dancing about, singing "ding dong the wicked witch is dead": but to be candid, whatever grievances I had with the woman over the decades, the last few years of her wretched madness made me feel sorrier for her than I would have ever thought possible.

I once threatened to dance on the woman's grave. I rather think that in my aged condition my knees and hips might give way if I tried to carry out my younger self's threat. Nevertheless, the overwhelming reason (amongst many zillion others) for my antipathy towards the woman was to do with her government's implementation of a tremendously underfunded "Care in the Community" policy, which contributed to a schizophrenic drug user who had been denied basic mental care, monitoring, and assistance, stabbing me in the face with a used syringe on a public street down which I had been walking accompanied by my then live-in-girlfriend of six odd years, in broad daylight. This is in a country with universal health care, by the way.

For some reason, I don't recall the couple of months following this incident (HIV testing, nervous breakdown, police identity parades, relationship breakdown etc) with any great fondness. But then again, this Care in the Community policy was a lot worse for folk like Jayne Zito, whose husband Jonathan was murdered by a schizophrenic some few months later in 1992.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/may/17/jayne-zito-trust-charity-schizophrenia-clunis

Mind you, I suppose if I had been a miner, or a print worker, or a worker in part of the UK's manufacturing industries, I might still be in the queue with my tap shoes nicely polished, awaiting my turn: which is why, I suppose, she will have to be cremated…or maybe buried at sea. As long as they put the sharpened stake between the correct ribs I reckon we'll have little chance of her rising from the grave: watery or fiery as the case may be.

Then again, she had some good points as well. She was a great war-leader. Some of her reforms were desperately needed by UK PLC. But the mistakes she made were greater than the good she managed: principal amongst them being the fracturing and fragmenting of British society, which was sacrificed on the twin altars of monetarism disguised as economic realism, and individualism: because, as she said most famously "there is no such thing as society", which is the attitude that led to the underfunding of the Care in the Community in the first place, and an attitude with which I profoundly disagree.

It seems that even many of our American cousins are coming to this conclusion about mental health too: that some folk actually need monitoring, care, and in some cases supervision: and this is something that our taxes ought to be paying for.