margaret

Margaret Thatcher won her third election on my 21st birthday. It felt inauspicious and inevitable.  We drove to Bridlington. It was bracing. We sat on the beach and drunk the best part of a bottle of champagne. I don't seem to remember there being any real doubt about the outcome of the election and for this reason it didn't seem right to be celebrating. I went swimming in the sea. For the hell of it. There is little pleasure to be gained from swimming in the North Sea in early June on the day of a British general election. At some point we must have driven back across the moors. In my memory this all occurred in late Winter not early Summer. I imagine we went out to eat in the evening. I remember a large barn of a restaurant that served fancy burgers and being drunk and How Soon Is Now playing and then sitting outside beside the Ouse but that might have been another birthday or someone else's birthday or it might never have happened at all. The only things that stick are swimming in the sea and knowing Thatcher was about to win another election. Which was not good news. Bad news for the country, for us, for me and above all for my 21st birthday. It felt like this thing - Thatcher - would never end. She would always be there, buggering up my birthdays, casting a pall over our youth, leaving us searching for the light at the tail end of long Summer days.