Yes, I know that today is Thursday but it's next Thursday that I am eagerly anticipating. You see, that will be the day after the funeral. Whose funeral, you ask? Do you really need to ask? Well, perhaps you do - if you are not an inhabitant of this sceptred isle set in a silver sea. Anyway, the funeral in question is that of Maggie That..., sorry, the late Baroness Thatcher. If you have been living on a different planet to everybody else who might stumble upon this blog (or the two or three poor, demented fools who look in every day), you will need to be told that Margaret Thatcher, the United Kingdom's first (and so far only) woman Prime Minister died on Monday this week.
On Tuesday, my daily paper, which is a broadsheet, ran to 44 pages in the general news section, that is, excluding the separate business and sport sections. Of those 44 pages, no fewer than 31 were devoted to the life, times and death of Maggie, and those pages carried no advertising. Yesterday, the first 11 pages were likewise. I had to visit our local Asda with a prescription and while I was waiting for the pharmacist to fill it, I wandered over to the newspaper stand. Every newspaper (with the exception of Sporting Life) devoted its front page to... guess who. No, wait a minute! The Daily Express didn't! Now that did rather surprise me as the Express is a Tory paper - or so I always thought. (They carried a story about a new super-gel which might be the answer to pain relief for sufferers from osteo-arthritis without the side effects commonly associated with the drugs currently used.)
Now I know that there are some people who think that Maggie will be found sitting right next to God (others think she will be telling God what to do), but I do find the adulation just a little OTT. Sure, she did a very good job as Prime Minister and was arguable the best peace-time PM this country has had in the past 150 years or so. And she didn't hang about over the Falklands affair. But I thought she got carried away with herself. Indeed, it seemed to me that by the time she was ousted, she thought herself infallible. Either way or any way round, come next Wednesday I will have had quite enough. But now I come to think of it, next Thursday's paper will be full of the funeral - so roll on Friday!
2 comments:
I'm with you.
I hate it when the media beats a dead horse.
(no pun intended)
I have a huge amount of respect and admiration for Lady Thatcher. But, as Skip noted, the media WILL flog that dead horse. It's not as bad on this side of the pond but on Monday it was "all Maggie, all the time."
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