Bookish designs

I am dying to read some fiction!  Just dying.  I haven't read anything made-up and wonderful since December last year when I read Jonathan Franzen's 'Freedom' (which I would heartily recommend to anybody who might be interested).

The reason for the dearth of fiction in my life at present is due to the fact that I've been reading two books in succession since January: one about Britain in the Seventies ('When the Lights Went Out') and 'Thatcher's Britain', in an attempt to understand the reason for the snarling polarisation the Iron Lady seems to inspire in people, even those of around my age and younger.

I am young enough not to have remembered first-hand or understood much about Mrs. T's premiership, other than the vague remembrance of school milk suddenly not being available any more (which was a wonderful thing; our milk used to get left on the radiators all morning and was curdled by the time we got it.  I'm sure this is the reason why I can't look at a glass of the white stuff these days without being ever so slightly sick in my mouth...and don't get me started on the smell of milk in a hot drink).  I also remember 'Margaret Thatcher's Maths', which was a game my friend Candy and I used to play in our first year at junior school, in an attempt to make maths a bit less boring.  All it consisted of was the two of us reading aloud from our textbooks in a 'Margaret Thatcher' voice, but still...it made us laugh.  I also vaguely recall the Poll Tax riots in 1990, but I was thirteen years old then and wouldn't be paying it anyway, so it didn't get much of my attention.  Not as much as Kylie and Jason did, anyway.

Friends much older than me always, without exception, disparage Mrs. T and hold her in huge amounts of contempt for ruining the country.  My Dad, on the other hand, always used to say she was the best prime minister we ever had, which coming from a single dad holding down two jobs and single-handedly trying to raise three little girls, made me think she couldn't have been that bad.  But I've always been fairly ambivalent really, until a conversation with a friend of around my age sparked my interest.  I can't remember what we were initially talking about, but she said that she couldn't wait for Mrs. T to die so she could be one of the first to "dance on her grave".  She is a mild-mannered, balanced and lovely person, but she said this with such venom that it surprised me.  I mentioned that I thought the idea of wanting to dance on somebody's grave was a bit nasty, to which she replied that Mrs. T deserved it.

This made me ask my friend exactly what it was that she was so angry about?  I wasn't asking to be facetious; I genuinely wanted to know what had inspired such fury in her.  But as soon as I asked the question, her anger dissolved into slight anxiety as it became clear that she didn't really know.  "My Dad's always hated her" was her eventual response, and it made me think that I should try to familiarise myself with what she actually did, and why people always seemed to vote for her regardless.

So now I've nearly finished the two books, and now I have some idea of what went on...and I wish I could say I cared, or had a real opinion, but I don't!  The books were very interesting to read, but I still couldn't really provide a full explanation of the intricacies of Mrs. T's premiership, except to say that I can completely understand the polarity now, because it was all so black-and-white.  The full, gory detail, however, pretty much bounced off my brain as I read, embarrassing as that is to admit.

Some books do that.  I've read Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' twice, but I still couldn't really discuss it intelligently with anyone, because it hardly made an impression on me (also something quite embarrassing to admit considering its 'classic' status).  Orwell's 'Down and Out in Paris and London' on the other hand, is a book I've also read twice, and found so brilliant that bits of it have burned themselves into my brain.

So anyway.  When I've finished this 'Thatcher' book, which will hopefully be at some point tomorrow, I'm going to gorge myself on fiction, which I've been buying a lot of recently, partly in anticipation of reading something creative again, and also partly due to watching the marvellous 'Faulks on Fiction' which has given me so many new reading ideas that I wish I hadn't watched any of it!