An extract by one of my favourite contemporary writers.

So this is where all that anger started — the anger that confused so many, on the announcement of Baroness Thatcher’s death. All those people childishly downloading Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead or throwing parties, “celebrating” her passing. Among many commentators, there was bewilderment over the fireworks that were set off and the champagne — put away in cupboards for so many years for this day — being drunk. Why would you celebrate a death? The death of someone hard-working, old and confused? It is, surely, unnecessarily crude. It is just not classy. 

But for all those who were left behind, to mourn their own towns, the sadness and the fear had turned to anger, as it always does — all anger is just fear, brought to the boil. And that is when so many impotent but determined entries were made in diaries. Entries made when a factory closed, or Section 28 brought in, or a relative came back from a protest, bleeding. Entries made when politics seemed to get very, very personal. Entries when politics became dangerous and destructive.

And they will all have been written differently, on different days, in different pens in a thousand different ways, but what they all boiled down to was this: “I can’t do anything else, now, but outlive this. Outlive you. All I can do is outrun you.

By Caitlin Moran, beautifully put.