Byline: Fordyce Maxwell
COINCIDENCE is a wonderful thing. One night after reading the newspapers thoroughly and watching television news - I like a choice of worries for the insomniac small hours - I got drawn into a potted history of Not The Nine O'Clock News. Next morning, I read that Mrs Thatcher, one of that show's prime targets in the early Eighties, with good reason, was Britain's top prime minister.
Are they mad? I wondered when I saw the morning headline, before reading a little further to realise it was only one mad person, the revisionist historian Francis Beckett, supplying his pecking order of prime ministers for a magazine.
It is true that Mrs Thatcher, as she was before being ennobled - probably a disappointment to her because it fell short of sainthood, but the best a secular nation could do - polarised opinions.
She certainly polarised mine, as she did Scots asked to pay a poll tax, the millions including my mild-mannered and entirely apolitical Auntie Ella, who could only refer to her as "that bloody woman", and a former colleague who called her "an evil wumman".
Then I remembered that many people, including other colleagues and buyers of their own council houses at knockdown prices, still think she was the best thing to happen to Britain, a wonderful woman who shook up a dozy, whingeing populace, made us stand on our own feet and made greed good for those who could stand the pace.
Those who think that way include Mr Beckett, who gave Mrs Thatcher - and, let's be fair, Clement Attlee - the full five points available on his rating, because she "took one sort of society and turned it into another sort of society".
Brass EarringsAh, I see. He doesn't say she improved what was there, as Clement Attlee and his Cabinet tried to do, only that she changed it. We can all agree on that.
And where did Not The Nine O'Clock News come in while I pondered the Thatcher headline? Because it triggered a memory of Rowan Atkinson, Mel Smith, Griff Rhys Jones and Pamela Stephenson in cowboy gear sitting round a campfire singing of how they believed in Mickey Mouse, Mother Goose, nursery rhymes, that the Ayatollah told a darn good "knock-knock" joke, that Lucille Ball was under 30 and other implausibilities, before concluding: "But I cain't believe Ronald Reagan is president."
I could never believe his great friend, Mrs Thatcher, was prime minister.
A friend recently lost six pounds in three days on the self-explanatory, desperately off-putting, boiled-beetroot diet. My father-in-law, and only he could have persevered, once had even more spectacular success with a diet based on whole boiled cauliflowers. Recently, an actress claimed to lose weight by living, if you can call it that, on maple syrup.
This morning I had an e-mail, which I assume was nothing personal, from a doctor offering to cure weight problems with a pill made from a Kalahari desert cactus.
At the same time, vast (appropriately) amounts of media space and television time are devoted to explaining why one-third of the population is obese and why, in Bill Bryson's phrase, we so often find ourselves behind someone with "a butt the size of Idaho".
embroidered patches
Thinking of beetroot, caul-iflower, maple syrup and my failed attempt to make a Mars Bar diet popular, my memory was triggered again by a conversation with a farmer. He told me of how he and several friends of the same middle-age vintage, when the question of where to have their trouser belt - above the belly or be
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