The Grocer

From blustery to Wellie weather. And everyone else around here got snow mixed in with their cold, pounding rain. I try to be even more hyper whilst trying to deliver a programme entitled 'Signs of Spring' because it's hard not to notice a lack of springfulness.

As I came back from the hairdresser's, through Zellers, my eye rested for a moment on a flimsy, black, buttonless jacket. It felt like voile. Then I noticed a label on it that said, 'This garment is not a swimsuit'. How useful, I thought, and how could anyone EVER think it was.
I felt it was in the same class of 'duh!' statements as the one they show as 'Bones' begins, 'May contain graphic, forensic content'. I should bloody well hope so.

My history reading has now gotten me to times I actually remember, and yet remember the surface of. The days of constant swapping back and forth between Labour and Tory parties in power, Wilson and Heath. And then there was the scandalous leader of the Liberal Party, Jeremy Thorpe, a 'notorious homosexual'. Well, clearly not that notorious, I seem to remember it coming as a bit of a shock. Then Jim Callaghan, ex-pupil of Mayhem, long before it was Mayhem of course, in those days it was Northern Grammar. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

My least favourite of all these was Ted Heath. A Tory, so he didn't score very highly with me politically, but that wasn't it. If he was a character in a play, he would be an unsympathetic character. And it seems it wasn't just me, Andrew Marr portrays him as exactly that. A Premier that no-one particularly liked. He describes him as friendless.
Yet he was friendless because he was the first to occupy such a position who wasn't part of the Old Boys' network. He wasn't from an upper middle class background, he broke through the barriers.
Hmmm....interesting, never thought of any of them in that way.

And then....I remember this happening, but in a million years wouldn't have seen how amazing it was. In a government driven by anti-immigration public feeling, with Enoch Powell constantly rotweilering him and with a recently introduced piece of immigration legislation that was basically colour-biased, against all criticism, when Idi Amin came to power in Uganda, Ted Heath had 28,000 Ugandan Asians airlifted out of Uganda and brought to Britain.
Hell I hate it when you find out the people you dislike are just human.