Something like an eulogy

This weekend I lost my pen pal.

I don’t receive an awful lot of post, and when I do it tends to be nothing more exciting than a bank statement. For as long as I can remember I have written letters to Joan in Scotland, and she has written back, as her poor hearing meant we didn’t have much luck communicating on the phone.
Joan is my grandmother, but she’s never been “granny” – it sounded old and unfashionable, and she was never either of those things.

Despite being a few weeks from her 91st birthday, I rather naively imagined that Joan would never die, or at least not so soon. I’m a little fuzzy on dates and time frames but I understand that she was in hospital, I wrote to her, she wrote to me, she came out of hospital, I wrote, she wrote, she went back in and it didn’t strike me as very serious, I wrote, I wrote, then the doctors said she was dying.
It didn’t seem possible. I hadn’t made the visit I thought about for months, she hadn’t met my boyfriend, I hadn’t sent her a photo of my new blonde hair colour (her response to my ever-changing do was that “Gentlemen prefer blondes.”) Selfishly, I wasn’t ready for Joan to die.

The day after the news, I got the train to Dumfries, meeting my dad during one of the changes.
When we got to the hospital, I knew the second I caught a glimpse of her that Joan wasn’t the woman I had known anymore. No possible description could avoid sounding shocking, and the image haunts me. Joan was much better than the pain she would have been in without the morphine. I only stayed in Scotland for a little over 24 hours – there was nothing I could have done besides making peace with what was going to happen. The doctors had predicted, before my dad even called me, that she might not make it overnight. Defiant until the end, Joan surprised them with an extra week.

Joan died overnight in hospital at the start of the weekend, and the news was a relief to me. Like I said, Joan was better than that hospital. Before, I never had any feelings about the afterlife, but now I am completely sure that she is once again the laughing, smiling, well-groomed, anecdote-sharing, perfect-English-speaking, strong woman who I knew. I have never been surer that somewhere else, someone is getting hell for saying “me and him” rather than “him and I.” And they don’t know it yet, but they are bloody fortunate for it.

I could write forever but I shan’t.
With my love as always Joan. See you later.


(I know it's not very trendy to like James Blunt's music, but something about this song makes a lot of sense to me right now.)

Frank Turner wrote this song after his grandmother died. Whenever I have listened to it before, it makes me feel closer to my other late grandma. It makes the whole thing feel a little less sad.

An experience of "The Iron Lady"

Okay then folks: I'm not a political girl. I studied the 'Thatcher era' in very brief detail during GCSE Drama, but I took a lot more in about Yuppies than anything else. When it came to A-Levels I witnessed a lot of my peers studying Government & Politics and suddenly assuming they were future politicians with decades of 'well informed' political knowledge stored into their heads, learnt, of course, within 2 years. I've never claimed any political knowledge further than anything I have learnt from hearsay, infrequent news absorption and 'Mock The Week' reruns from the last 6 years - and as Frankie Boyle would later say, the show reports very little to do with politics, or even the news. In short, I am not a politician, a politics student, or a politics enthusiast.

All I can claim is that tonight I went to see 'The Iron Lady' in the cinema.

It was only about ten days ago that I saw 'Girl With The Dragon Tattoo' and saw the advertisement for The Iron Lady and said to my friends "Oh what, have they made a film about Iron Man's wife?" (I'm really hilarious, you see?)
And so I held no knowledge of the making of this film, or of Margaret Thatcher - the life of whom the film is primarily about.

I have been to see the film, walked out of the cinema, put my iPod in, been driven home, got into my house, checked my e-mails (nothing exciting), and sat down to write this. I have a Wikipedia tab open on Margaret Thatcher - which I will justify in just a moment - and a Google search on "peers" to check that I'd used the word correctly at the beginning of this entry. (Forgive me, I am tired.)

So about the film.
It runs almost like two threads - if you can imagine - running both beside each other and yet miles apart from each other. The film begins about the later (present day) life of Thatcher, and begins to include scenes of her upbringing and political rise, weaving and referring back to a portrayal of present day Thatcher, played beautifully by Meryl Streep.

Like I said before, I have nothing to do with politics and so that aspect of the film was informative and yet relatively unimportant to me. On the walk between the cinema and the car I overheard a girl say "I would have enjoyed that film more if I wasn't a historian." Well, I'm not a historian. If you're looking for an opinion of the film from a historian or a politician then you're reading the wrong thing (my apologies to inform you so late on, you've read a far way down now, you might as well continue mightn't you?)

I am, however, for whatever I lack in other areas, a human and a woman. (Tah-daaaah!)
The reason I have a tab open about Margaret Thatcher is in a bid to understand not her political career, but her present life. I have learned that:

"Thatcher suffered several small strokes in 2002 and was advised by her doctors not to engage in any more public speaking. After collapsing at a House of Lords dinner, she was admitted to St Thomas' Hospital in central London on 7 March 2008 for tests. Her daughter Carol has recounted ongoing memory loss."

There are also three accounts of Thatcher declining invitations to prestigious events due to 'frail' or 'ill' health. As a woman in her nineties, this is only to be expected.

The biopic portrays the present-day Thatcher as a woman suffering from ill mental health (or perhaps dementia) who is experiencing hallucinations of her husband, who would be at least six years dead by this point. The audience see the pity and sorrow her daughter and staff display toward her in this mental state.

It is in this thread of the film that there are no history lessons. In this thread it does not matter whether the film is about Margaret Thatcher or the history of the British political system. This part of the film could be about any woman, or any person, who is getting a bit old and doesn't necessarily know it; or any person who is experiencing grief; or any person with mental health problems; or any person who drinks a little more than the NHS would recommend.
Towards the end of the film an emotional climax within this thread is reached, and I am not afraid to admit that I cried - I didn't just well up, I had tears streaming down my face and I had to cover my mouth with my jumper in case I disturbed anyone else in the packed cinema. That woman could be my mother in a few years, and then she could be me.

Whilst I know nothing about the British political system I do know that, should no unnatural circumstances take place, I will get old, and the people I love will die, and I will then die.

I could get really preachy about how this film is going to "make me live life to the full" but that would go in the face of what I believe about 'resolutions' and promising to be a person I'd never quite become.
All that I know is that whilst watching that film I thought that everything in my life is okay. It is okay if I keep on getting my heart broken and abusing my health, because if I can shorten that horrendous ageing process just a little bit, I'd be lucky. Of course you don't all agree with that, and to a giant extent I don't either. But what I mean is that ageing looks cruel, and not necessarily on the ageing person, but on the people who love that person...


Whatever. Go and watch the film. I promise you that regardless of whether you love Thatcher, whether you hate Thatcher, or whether, like me, you know very little about Thatcher, that film will probably have some impact on you. Let me know if it does, and let me know if you want your money back - although here's a heads up: you'd not get a single penny out of me.