Hope. Fuck it.

Hope.

I am quite sure I don’t have any, so that is the first thing I should really clarify. I don’t miss it, and I find great comfort in knowing that. The only thing I could really wish for I will never get. Everything else is simply within reach if I want it or chose to take it, so I don’t have to hope for it.

Loosing you was paralysing and liberating, putting in motion a set of events that are so frighteningly and desperately true, there is no resistance. Your death set me free. The beauty and strength of that sentence is being forced to reconcile with the chronically debilitating reality that my heart has been killed with pain.

When everything around me and within me is removing signs you ever existed, how will I stand in your company? When I cannot bring myself to think of your smile because I cannot carry the weight of its absence, how many times can my heart die without breaking down and stopping?

This truth leaves no room for fiction. I can’t hide it. I can’t pretend. I can’t be fake; I can’t hold on, I can’t pretend. I sit quietly. I am standing. I see. I breathe. I feel. I shiver. I shiver in pain. I shiver with life.   I can feel you with me.   But that makes your absence even more obvious. If I am not diverted and forced to attend to something else, I can be in a place that is extraordinarily free and happy, yet lonely and painful.

I didn’t choose any of this. I would take “hope” back if it meant having you. But that is not something I can do. Nothing will ever change that reality. So I am embraced by freedom.

I have nothing to feel guilty for. I have no regrets. Two more freedoms that I don’t want but that are defining me.

I repeat: when everything around me and within me is removing signs you ever existed, how will I stand in your company? When I cannot bring myself to think of your smile because I cannot carry the weight of its absence, how many times can my heart die without breaking down and stopping?

I don’t have the energy nor do I have the strength to entertain anything but the intensity and beautiful rawness of each instant. After the atomic bomb exploded, after I found myself being torn apart one supernova at the time, after each time I catch myself losing my breathe in tears, I simply find myself standing in a very clear, stark, true, comfortable corridor. There are no doors. There are no walls. I breathe in light and darkness and propel both into my veins.

Maybe I have been in similar position before, is it possible that was also freedom? No. I don’t have the insecurities, the inexperience, the fragility and innocence I had back then.   In the process of building a good and solid life I have made mistakes, bad choices, taken silly steps. They, rightly or wrongly, influenced me for years and years, each becoming more difficult to untangle. It’s like I was standing in a maze holding different strings as I tried to find my way out. Suddenly, over 20 years, 100s of strings were in my hand and it was impossible to untangle the wrong from the right ones.

Acceptance of myself came at the end of a very long self discovery process that was kicked started when we met. Clarity of that acceptance and the depth of my strength were only revealed to me after the various layers were blown up a few months ago. When it all exploded every string I was holding onto was instantly destroyed, disintegrated, like it never existed nor mattered.

The reset button was automatically pressed for me. I don’t know much but I know it can’t be undone. There is no return. Everything is different. The way I breathe, the way I see colours, the way I stand, the way I am absorbing freedom. As I had to make room for unimaginable pain, unexpected challenges, overwhelming strength of love, I also had to kick my insecurities to neverland, finding myself so exposed I had to build new walls just so I could corner against them. I had to find the strength to cry unimaginable pain.

I am powered by the warmth I stored up when I was looking into your eyes. I feed on the memory of your arms around me. I am so lonely. But I don’t want anyone to stand next to me. We are enough for me. I repeat: I am so lonely. But I am so free. And I am so me. I am erupting light. I am so comfortable with myself, with my past, with my choices, with my future.

I want and will live in freedom. Freedom does not prevent me from loving my lif, from being true, authentic, at peace. Freedom allows me to be even more spontaneous, sweet, caring. I am more grateful, more attentive, more alert, more aware. Freedom allows me to shiver in pain whilst I am shaking in excitement. I have found a playfulness that I didn’t even have before. It’s both of us combined. It’s stark, it’s witty, it’s fun, it’s challenging, it’s caring. I like it, I want it, I keep it.

I feel fire running through my veins. I cannot wait to jump off plane. I am already living like the darkness doesn’t exist anymore – as I have seen it, been there, done that, got the scars. Yet it runs in my veins in a weird, incorrect, unavoidable and unchangeable symbiotic partnership with the will and joy to live. I am learning to put into focus my new surroundings, to read through people’s actions rather than words. I am forgiving every stumble on my way. I am going to walk new roads, I am going to redesign old roads, I am going to open new businesses, I am going to build our family further. I am going to smile to strangers.   I am going to let the tears flow. I am going to let the rawness pour out. I am going to take 3 weeks off. No apps, no emails, no information. I am going to force my body to new levels. I am going to exercise and fine-tune it so I can feel its life. I am going to pour the honesty somewhere I don’t have to look out for more pain.

As I ask out loud in the bedroom how many time can someone die with grief before they are finally no longer alive, I look around and I know l am going to let life reshape me. Through the next 21 days and well after. There are no strings, because there are no walls. There are no walls because the walls don’t exist anymore.

Freedom after hope. Freedom? Freedom! Fuck hope.

I am in a very weird way, ok with that.   “This” is it.
POAO

 

 

 

 

 

 

I kick that ceiling what are you going to see?

So here I am again.   I have now started this letter so many times, so many versions of it, so many stories to tell you, so many things that when on black and white are really not that important and that forces me to go to find the essence of how I feel, because that is what I need to tell you about, whatever that may be. And I am not sure just yet where we are going tonight.

I just can’t decide what to say, how to say it, what is more important, what makes sense, what is private, what is not. I need to strip all the extra layers, to quieten the background noise and the confusion all the intensity and stress has plunged me in I was thinking I shouldn’t write to you anymore.  It is obviously all in my head, you are not reading it, but others are.

Do I care?  Not really, I have no problems – apparently – with discussing very personal sides of my life in a letter format that you will not read.  And this is hardly public, semi public maybe.  I couldn’t care less if it was. I also have some sort of track record in being able to recall things and share them. Sharing us doesn’t make me feel any insecurity or vulnerable.   Nevertheless my inability to process emotions, good or bad that they may have been, over the last two weeks has resulted in a complete deadlock. The issue is I was literally stopped in my tracks as I was doing what I think it is the most complicated, challenging, empowering but still devastating, action someone in my position can do and that is saying goodbye and let go of your physical remains and our marriage, with all the pain and despair those actions bring, but when focusing on how entrenched both you and our marriage are in my heart, soul and life now. Right at that point, I was thrown back in hell.

Just over two weeks ago I slept for the first time since January without aids, without feeling scared and under attack.  I missed you, but I could miss you and not feel like I had to protect myself from the world. I was in bed and the kitties had finally calmed down and very just checking in to say hello and be cute, with Daphne clearly reassured that I was able to show her how head over heels I am for my doggie. I went to bed and lit your candles. I moved from your side to the centre. I hugged the pillow and I said good night to both you and the babies.

Yet last Tuesday I spent 2 hours crying in the park, only to find myself dialing on my phone and ask for help. I had been walking, crying, as I wanted to desperately feel you and somehow connect. There was so much built up pressure that I put ours songs on my iPhone as well as looked at the most private pictures of you I have from the days in Adelaide. The release came; the breakdown started, but than it just didn’t end. It carried on for 2 hours. Instead of walking, I found myself lying in the grass, unable to move it was so overpowering I could not get out of it alone. So I had to call for help and those beautiful faces showed up and let me cry on them again and sat next to me. Until we eventually made our way back home.

What changed from just a few days before when the night routine was so less devastating?  How could than I be in an even darker place.

The issue is not necessarily what place I find myself in.  I appreciate the intensity of grief and the various ups and downs that it brings, as well as all the changes and adjustments it forced. But was much more than all of this. This was multiplied by 30 and all for a set of reasons outside anything to do with my very personal loss of you and mostly induced by various governments or bank cock ups.   All contributing factors that I also had no choice to face and tackle. I am not going to bury my head in the sand so it call come back me in the ass a few months down the road, neither I will let any chance to change things for the better go by without me standing up for us.

But how long I can cope for.  I am not invincible and I am aware of my own fragility.

I know I have no resilience left.  I need to be able to say it, without feeling under even more pressure not to.  I can tap into us, into myself, into the strength I have inside me.  But I can’t substitute you.  Tapping into us means also accepting you are not there. So even tapping into us becomes crippling at times as this truth has so many sides to it, including knowledge that there is no longer an endless source of strength next to me.  I happen to no longer have my safe heaven.  I can’t and will not be drawn to say I am fine without you.  I am sure it is early days and it will get better. Neither of these statements means anything at all to me. They are so detached from my situation that I may just have been told that the next change to see a total eclipse by our house is in 2045.   It is expected, you know it is.  I need to go back to something I just say and much more important. I will not be drawn to say I am fine without you. Global expectations are now that I am doing better. And yes I am, but no because time is a great healer, not because it becomes less raw, or whatever else I have been told. I am doing better than I was because I am less numb and I can see that my future starts from you and me and what was our present. I am doing better because I am teaching myself to let go of the things that will unlikely make live again. I am getting better because I can see that all the things that some wait years to do only really accomplish is to delay or prevent me from continuing the journey for my life I have set and embarked upon when we married. Yes of course I get the fact that also has changed, but that is where I was and what was made happy, even outside our married and couple life.

 

I will not shy away from saying that you (and our relationship) defined my life and me, it has shaped it and I am as happy with that direction today than I was on June 2, 2015.  Possibly much more lonely and sad, but nonetheless determined to follow my truth.

I will not fall into affirmations that are just not me.  I can only continue from where I am because of you and thanks to you.

It is about being authentic.  It is about my own authenticity, both exploring and living it.  Our love to me means I was able to embark and live fully a journey of self-respect, understanding, and growth.  It meant finding peace.  It meant, and still does, truth and hope, even when death rips us apart. It meant safety and security: emotionally and physically.  It defined me. I would rather not have lived a single day, than never having had that feeling. Why am I even saying this?  You know, you were there.  My heart healed yours, your soul healed mine.  I am saying it because I have to go back to it.

I have to let go of Australian immigration, the Foreign Office, their forms, I have to let go of banks, and bureaucracy and selfish and emotionally stunted individuals that want to drain me. I have to go back to the place I was when I felt I could let go of your physicality without letting go of you and your beauty and strength.

In Santorini I let go of you, only physically, although I had no choice and you had already been taken, but that was my decision, my moment, my way.  I could not walk that evening as I was making my way to Skaros. I knew what I was about to do; I had done it before in other places but this time it was different.  I knew what it really meant. I knew you were everywhere, and yet I knew you were really nowhere. I was not setting you free, but I was setting us free and letting us go whilst hoping you would enjoy being in the place that we kept going back to and that contains endless happy and close memories, which will forever live in my heart and in the atoms that made up your body.

To let myself live I had to let go of your body and detach myself from it so I could anchor myself in your heart.  Let’s face it; your body had been taken away already.  Kicking, fighting, crying, howling, nothing would or will bring you back.

I also know that whilst I could let go of ashes, I will never be in a place where I can just let go of you.  It is never going to happen.  I have to force myself to let go of what will not allow me to live if I don’t. I have to retain what will allow me to be true and soar again.  Time is time and nothing more.  It doesn’t heal you unless you heal yourself.  I am not going to pay lip service to things I don’t believe in.  I credit our marriage for all the goodness that I have been nurtured with.

But, just like healing, our marriage was a choice, it was a journey, it was a challenge.  It was true and this is all about truth. We write our own story and we choose the wording.  The ending?  Not so much, it turns out.  But the tone and the legacy are defined in the story. The meaning is the end.

My story will be yours, has been yours, may – and it likely – will take me in different places than we had set out to go, but it will be yours as it starts with us.  As I carry our choices. My story is also my own, but we are me.  Why would I even I have to say that? It is like I am trying to make people uncomfortable about the fact that I feel like we were one. Screw those people, their loss if they have never felt it and not my problem in the slightest.

It starts with you (and us), simply because I started flying when you held me.  I learnt to let go and open my eyes only when it was safe to do so. I know how to fly, I know what powers my heart and what clears my mind.  My clarity comes from our love.

I took my own wedding ring off two weeks ago.  Because I don’t know where and how I will end up, but I have to face the reality my marriage was forced to end.  I can be strong enough to say that without shaking in fear about things it does not imply about us. I put it back on and took it off about 700 times since, but only as the entire bureaucratic and external pressure was piled on me unexpectedly and diverted my focus from us to every other statement that had to be made. I put it back because I felt so offline that I needed to reconnect and a very nice friend of yours simply told me to put it on when I felt it was helpful and need it to keep me safer.  And so I did.  She was very right.

On our wedding day, I promised to love you and honour you.  On the day of your death, I promised you I would live.

I promised you I would be there for your parents and love your niece.  I promise I would stand by your sister and love our friends.

I promised you I would cry and miss you, I promised myself I would live for both us.

Two weeks ago I was starting to fulfill my promises.  I also had to stand by new facets of those promises, like fighting for your name and our marriage.  That has taken me off piste somewhat and caused me to pay great emotional price.

As I write I understand the importance of you once again.  You are my resilience, even today.

If I go back to us, to what I feel as good and honest, I can take on all the governments in the world whilst holding your nice and let her happiness wash over me.

As the plane lands, I am back home.  In many ways.

Until next time.

I love you and very much yours, Pengu

 

PS. Tonight is “Just like fire”

 

Faded

“You were the shadow to my light

Did you feel us?

Another start

You fade away

Afraid our aim is out of sight

Wanna see us

Alive

Where are you now?

 

Songs, lyrics, melodies, heartbeats, smiles, tears, feelings, I don’t know what is going on half of the time, yet I am absolutely clear. I have no direction, yet I understand where I am headed. And I seem to find songs that connect you to me, life to death, songs that narrate emotions, fears, hopes and our story, but that is just me adding my own to these songs I am sure. I dive into these songs’ meaning and messages and than I go through and over them. They work their way through me and I work my way through them. I sense an ability of these songs to vibrate inside me. They just describe perfectly a journey that changes daily. I get lost on every corner of this new world and all I can do is to backtrack or just sit and try to understand where or what I am. It is a task to keep up with my own thoughts. Once I nailed them down than I simply become aware I have lost myself again. I try to frame them but I am the frame. I try to see where the branches leads to, but I only discover they lead to me. I try to grab these confused, messy, sloppy, loose connections my brain webs on a daily basis. It is exhausting, but when I do, within it I find a bit of you, a bit of me, a bit of happiness.

 

“Was it all in my fantasy?

Where are you now?

Were you only imaginary?”

 

There are so many truths in these few lines. My values and logic have been rewritten and there are no clouds, there is no confusion, there is pain, excruciating pain, and that love, the love that we had, that still fuels me, that very love that is ripping me to pieces and making me feel a very incredible and profound loniless still fuels me. That love has given me power, strength and clarity. But I can’t help to fear it was only in my mind, imaginary.

 

Some of these lines make me cry, other smiles, most tend to simply speak for me.

 

I now measure truth by the intensity of the tears something brings me to. And they have brought “some” tears. But for some reasons I play them even louder, as often as I can. I don’t cry all the time, most of the times I do. I don’t set out wanting to cry, but why wouldn’t I let myself when I am taken there?

 

It may make strangers and others uncomfortable, but it brings me sanity and clarity, after I recover of course. The matter of fact is that there is complete truth and authenticity in every tear I shed at present. Having been sculpted through tears makes each smile more vivid, painted with brighter colours, with a stronger identity, for however seldom they may be.

 

I am tuned in, I understand what is happening, I lived and experienced every second of what happened. I may have had not a clue on what was bubbling up on the side back than, but I have always focused on you and me, on us, on what was happening and its true meaning and depth, magnitude, devastation and incredible tenderness. I have chosen from the very first second to let it transform me, not that it was a choice per se. I could have run, hidden away, pretended, gone “back to normal”. What a bunch of lies that would have been. You don’t fight an overflown river. You don’t stand up to a tsunami. You can’t. It kills you more times than not.

 

“These shallow waters, never met

What I needed

I’m letting go a deeper dive

Eternal silence of the sea I’m breathing

Alive

Where are you now

Under the bright but faded lights

You’ve set my heart on fire”

 

The only way I could – and still trying to – make it through it is to somehow continue to breath, for you as much as for me, but doing so and knowing I am going to be completely thrown under water and into the rocks. I have no real choice but to let the current hit me, drag me under water, reach the surface again and be taken under all over again. Because I can do no greater honor to us that completely surrounded, letting it wash over me. I believe in us, in our love. Something will happen. So I let it take its course. I held your hand when I saw nothing but darkness, but I let go of your hand on my own, before I was made to. That was the hardest, most significant and defining moment of my life. I now count my life since the day I lost you. Everything else is now irrelevant, distant, unimportant and insignificant. I never thought or felt I was abandoning you or letting you go. You had been taken already. And I stood there on my own, as your soulmate without his soul. I knew back than as I did before all of these happened, that all the smiles, happiness, memories we shared were my wealth and power and that it was all running in me. I married you to be your family. You married me to be my family. Letting go of your hand required me knowing that my heart would have never let go of you, of us. It was not easy, I am still out of breathe from it. I am strong but I am not invincible. So I miss you and I despair. And I am true to myself and you. It is devastating to be alive. It doesn’t mean I can’t be happy, but it is irrelevant to the journey. Again, I measure everything by truth. For as if this is a new startpoint, just like the song says, it’s counterintuitive, I want to fight it, I want to react, I want to stand in spite of adversity. But to what avail? So I don’t. I force myself to be dragged under, as I know that to surface I have to let it take me under.

 

This is what I would image it would be to try and walk after an accident injured your spine. You just want to lay down, trying for hours and hours to move one fingertip at the time. It may take days or months. Other muscles will have to learn how to compensate, new pathways have to be built for the neurons to send and receive messages. It’s a journey of discovery, learning, shaping, devastation, pain.

 

This is not any different. Grief, losing you, saying goodbye to you and to us is exactly the same.

 

I am going completely insane. I am living in a world where faded images are overlapping familiar surroundings and real moments. I look around and I see you in the garden or in the living room – but I cannot make out any details. Your face eludes me, your eyes are obfuscated, your smile is hidden. And so I panic, thinking the memories are fading and that I am loosing even the last few bits of you I need to survive. I want to scream, I want to reach through time and space and grab them, I want to slow life down so I don’t loose any more of me or you, but really we are the same. And than I sit down and start looking at every picture of you I can find. And when I do, I am forced to look away, crashed by the memory of you, destroyed by what it meant to be happy, annihilated by the reality that you are not there. And so I crash, the respite of knowing I am not loosing all of my memories of us quickly evaporating against the reality that I cannot find enough strength to face them, as their recently strengthened importance simply means there will be no more. But it is more than just not having new memories.

 

But I am not invincible. It has been three months. It feels like yesterday. I won’t get up and move around just yet, I can’t move. But I can cry. And when I stop I hug the pillow and imagine it is you.

 

By allowing my heart and brain to miss you I can feel you. There has only ever been peace in your arms. Because you allowed me to be myself and you loved me for who I was, unconditionally, at my worst you unlocked my best. I miss sleeping, I miss feeling at peace, I miss feeling safe, I miss letting go of everything knowing I have you. I don’t know if I will ever sleep again. The thought of having lost that safety knocks me out. But the memories of your beautiful face and your arms somehow keep me going.

 

Today P&B HQ is one years old. It is still and will always be a my cave. You will live in my cave with me forever.

One week out

69 days.  1656 hours.  99360 minutes.  But I am not counting.  I just let it go, I let myself be absorbed by the time passing by.  I don’t fight it, most of the times at least I don’t.  I stopped screaming.  I have given in to the inevitability of my powerless mind and the restlessness of my heart.   I can cry on my own now.  I can smile on my own now.  I am almost a big boy now.  I sleep on my own – well I wish, normally I am surrounded by a very loudly snoring dog and two ultra needy kitties.

I sing some mornings when walking Daphne.  I feel my breath and my heartbeat.  I take it in.  I push my body to new boundaries and new challenges.  I work out harder.  I exhaust myself so I can feel stronger and get through it.

Sometimes I feel good.   This morning I burst into tears in the driveway.  I stayed there for 10 minutes.  It was ok and it was safe.  It was bright.  It was sunny.  The neighbors had just left.  I just got back from training and the tears started flowing as I was driving in.  It’s spring.  I can feel the air changing.  We had drinks in the garden this week.  I can feel the sun and the light changing.  Certainly the cats can feel it too.  Suddenly they expect feeding at 5AM…. Not going to happen… But they still wake me up…

The drive into the development almost looks like it did when we drove with the moving van almost a year ago.  In 2 months it will be our first wedding anniversary.  In 3 months it will be your birthday.  In 3 weeks it will be our first anniversary at P&B HQ. In one week it will be my birthday.  What an onslaught!   We are one week out from one of the days I have been dreading in the back of mind for the last 69 days.  I look down when I am in a shop and see birthday cards; I look away when I see balloons and wrapping paper.   I keep thinking what I will say when anyone says “happy birthday”.  I can’t prevent it, can I?  I can’t wipe it out, can I?  So may just well go and get ready for it.  I can’t.  I want it blown out of the calendar.  But that’s irrational, isn’t it?  Surely I should be mature, smiling as expected and be thankful.   Ah.  But that’s pushing it.  I won’t be able to obliterate my birthday from the face of the planet, but I don’t have to celebrate it.  Not this year anyways I don’t.  It’s like chocolate.  I have gone off it completely.    Who says that every birthday has to be happy anyways?  I just want a normal day.  I don’t want to feel lonelier or miss you even more than I do every other day.

What is with dates and anniversaries, birthdays or any other moment we celebrated in greater ways than other days anyways?

This week I cleaned and organised the office.  I found your degree, than your birth certificate.  I held it with one hand, time just stopped.  I read it.  I had tears swelling up in my eyes.  “1983” it read.  “32 years old” I counted.  I couldn’t move.  I was suspended with this piece of paper in my hand.  I don’t get it.  It is not like I was not aware of your date of birth or like I was oblivious to your age.  But there it was – in black and white.  So many thoughts run thought my head.  It would be a lie to say I didn’t think about all the lost moments, the years that will never be.  The memories that were never forged.  The smiles that I will never be a witness of.  The tears I will never be able to let flow whilst standing by your side or at a distance.  The many arguments we will not have.  The many times we would haveinevitably back tracked and one would have apologised to the other.   So many thoughts filled my mind in one instant. You would have liked it I think.  It was like a black and white movie in my mind.  It was very surreal, very slow but with my imagination running wild.

When the cold passed through my spine and out of my body, I folded the certificate and put it in a new folder.  I just couldn’t file it with the more “current paperwork”.  I couldn’t even put it in the same compartment.   I continued on.  I found your pay slips, letters and offers of employment.  I looked at your security passes and all the birthday cards people sent you over the years.  Your notebooks were next.  I opened one.  I read some of the notes you made.  I smiled because you were always so organised and on top of it.

I then found a little list with my presents and surprises for last year’s birthday.

It was like the side of a cliff suddenly detached itself and hit the ocean.  I could feel the waves ripple through my body.  The thoughtfulness, the preparation, the simplicity of your intentions, the purity of the gesture, the kindness of your love towards me.  The smiles that run through my face when I realised you actually planned some of those very “interesting” presents!

Definitely had some hits, and some (mostly) considerable missed opportunities.  I mean really, come on!  By than we had been together 5 years.  Some gifts were so wrong I couldn’t help but laughing.  You, Amazon and TK Max were the perfect trio and my worst nightmare.  You and sales and special offers, another perfect trio.  But no matter what, everything was meant to make me feel loved and important.

The note to pick up the coconut flour for the cake – possibly some new candles as well.  Oh the jam for the filling too!

The simple thought that you will never do that again makes me shake.  The pain is slightly different now; it is more subtle, less loud but still violent in its intensity and repercussions.

I just need to say thank you.  Thank you for taking the time to plan and prepare it all to make me feel important.  Thank you for hugging me every birthday and holding me closer. Thank you for bringing the cake to bed.  Thank you for sitting with me and actually watch the Tigr movie.  Thank you for letting me be silly, thank you for going along with it, it means the world to me.  Thank you for making it special, for planning it, for thinking what would make my day better.  Thank you for baking, for putting icing on the cake, thank you for lighting my candles 3 or 4 times and sing happy birthday each time.  Thank you for holding my hand and elbowing the knots in my back.  Thank you for the cards, thank you for the balloons, thank you for making me a Very Important Penguin.   I know I will never be a VIP again.

I miss being a VIP.  I miss being your VIP.  Pengu over and out.

Another night, the same Selena’ song.

When there was a bear

Hi, hello.

Part of me wants to ask how are you.  The other part is laughing I even thought of that.

I feel brave to even go there!  I try to get up and be brave in the morning and when I walk Daphne I go up the hill.  I feel the cold but I ignore the wind.  I breathe in.  I stop breathing.  I think of you.   I get myself to breath again.   I walk, probably unaware of the greater picture, but I force one foot to go in front of the other.  But as I do, I sense the legacy of us, that tidal inevitability and eternity of our love.  Sometimes I look up and smile.  Than one part of me laughs I did that.  Really?  Looking up? Sometimes I am blown away by despair.  Sometimes I look back and I don’t remember how I get where I am – most of the times to be truthful – sometimes I just don’t feel anything and keep walking.  Sometimes I skip to the music in my head.  Sometimes I feel alive without feeling distraught that you are not.

But I cannot say any of it.  If I scream out loud and shout the sound of pain, the majority of the people will have no idea how to handle me and run away.  If I share the impossible truth that life is still rushing through my veins, the remaining people will cherish the opportunity to congratulate me.  Both make me want to run away – the faster or the further away, the better.  The latter is more hurtful than silence and bottling things up.

It does feel like I am dying every other second only to be reborn a few moments later.  Time is different now.  Memories are different.  The very fabric of me has changed.  It has been stretched and dyed and it is still reshaping itself.  I need space, I need time, and I need to be a vagabond in my own heart and mind.  I need to dive into the essence, find our truth, rediscover it, and reassemble it.  I need space to move and be still in.  I need the space to build walls and than tear them down.  I need to be able to push through my own foundations and seed a new life.  I need the ability to lie down and not move, completely paralyzed by the magnitude of what has just happened.  I need to find new safe places, new moments in which to feel again and new emotions to feel.  I need new reasons to smile, new moments to treasure, refreshed fuel for my heart, new shapes for my mind to build dreams with.  New tears to celebrate whom you have been.

But I need to find all of this firmly in my past.   The present is fluid, the present is insignificant.  The present, right now, is irrelevant.  Today means nothing, yesterday means everything and the future is neither here or there, just a distant place that I already know how it will play out.  I can see you predicting the future and be absolute certain of it.  And you were also always right.  And I did it too, and I was right as well.  This is no different.  That is the one fact about your death I cannot avoid, nor would I want to.  It is beautiful to look back and to see you, to feel you, to sense the strength of our love and the depth of our connection.   I am also aware that there is a future.  I am not that clueless.  I am tuned in, I know me.  Thanks to you and me, thanks to us and the freedom we brought into each other, I know what I stand for and what I will achieve.   I don’t want to say it, right now is all about standing still whilst the explosion blows my every wall and layer off until the full rawness of me is exposed.

I don’t want to be alone so I seek contact with our friends and family and sometimes strangers, but I don’t want to be forced to feel emotions that don’t sound true.

There are so many whispers of hope and love around me.  They are coming so unexpectedly and are so powerful.   From the corners I wasn’t expecting that to be from as well as from where I was expecting them to come from. There are also screams of selfishness and gratuitous harm.   Normally I would run into the cave with you and flicker my worrying flipper when all the onslaught of change that happened this last week would hit me.  In the present, I can’t.  I tried.  It doesn’t work.  The flipper is paralyzed and there is no cave without a bear.  So to build my future, I have to bypass the present and build it on my past: when there was a bear.

I find it impossible.  I find it impossible to navigate life and meet people’s expectations.  I just don’t have the emotional energy to be blown off course.  I don’t have the strength to teach other what to say or not to say or to how to handle me.  I find myself screaming and crying in a corner in the evening of a day that started as a normal day.  I am crying because I have to defend myself on why I cannot take this “opportunity” to “cherish” our love and the “greatest gift I was given”, that is to say the opportunity to have met you.  I don’t have the strength to explain why “I am not back to normal yet”.  I try.  I try to explain what is happening and possibly I get close to explaining the loss, but how do you explain the power of loving you and knowing you.     How do I explain the despair that one can only feel when loosing the biggest part of your life?  And I do not need lecturing about whether or not it is in fact a loss.  It is.  I am done hiding behind fake words and meaningless definitions. It is a debilitating, life ending, and unstoppable loss.  There can be loss in full awareness of the incredible things you have brought into my life.   In fact, there is loss because of those very things you brought into my life.   That loss is simple obliteration of reason and love.

How can I explain that I am already extraordinarily aware of how incredible you were and how lucky and bless I feel?  It is irrelevant.  I have felt that way since the day we met.  I told you that all along.  We shared with each other how important, grateful and touched we both were with each other presence and love.  I don’t need to start re-affirming it now.   How sad would it be if I did, but I am!   Of course it is part of who I am, it runs through me every second of every minute of every hour of every day.  I feel the privilege, luck, simple beauty and just normality of what we had.  That is why I have no regrets.  I actually do not have any regrets.  Screw the various “stages” of grief.  Really we are going to have stages? And why not bringimg in scales to measure how far we are in the griefing process or how does it compare to the loss of a father, mother, son, friend?  Screw regret, guilt and scales.  I told you every day I loved you and that you meant the world to me, probably hundreds of time in a row on most days.  I stopped and kicked out the world to appreciate your presence and take in the safety, power and strength of our love.  I have no guilt.  I have done everything I could do.  I have no alternative but to accept that all I did  was no where near enough.   But I could only do that.  Even than, I pushed the boundaries so far, so wide, so out of my comfort zone and day-to-day reality.

How do I explain to someone that I can cry and be in complete despair without denying all of that wealth we had, all that richness that our life had?  I have lost my soul mate.

I don’t have to let anyone preach me into happiness.  But they could stand by me in silence, perhaps just standing there and call, even if I don’t answer. And a few incredible people do. And complete strangers do.  And I am aware of it.  And even when I don’t answer, I feel grateful.

It is really quite hard to keep walking up the hill with Daphne in the morning, knowing no one is at home getting ready and waiting for me to come back to kiss me goodbye before they go to work – no real need to fend off the unexpected words that cut through me.

My safe heaven is wherever I find you.  Wherever I don’t have to explain or talk.  Wherever I am not expected to make claims that I simply cannot stand up for.  Wherever I am given the chance just to be – without expectations of what I will do, how I will feel, or what it means if I simply cannot take on board anything else.  This is a feeling that I have never felt before.  I am in new grounds.  I have the need to be selfish, to look after myself – and only after myself so that I can breathe again.  This survival mode I have been thrown in really leaves very little room for unexpected grandiose acts – I just don’t have the emotional energy.

As the nuclear snow falls down and settles, I look around me and see the people you loved.  I see for the first time in two months their pain embedded in their visual expressions.  I feel like I have to hold them and protect them, that is to be fair my only priority.  I understand their pain; I also know how much you loved them.  How much you cared for them.  How fiercely protective you were.   Mostly I know what is like to wake up, wonder around and do things whilst thinking all along what it was like when there was a bear.

I love you.

Today it was one of your latest favourite, Good for You.  You are such a tart.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Hi”

“Hi”

I never thought that such a short, common, almost insignificant word could wreck me as much as it does.  It hurts when I say it, as I know you will never hear it.  I miss hearing you saying it every night as you walked through the door more than anyone will ever know.

I can only guess the number of times I have said that word to you.  It was probably right when you were in the middle of reading or watching something.  I have always been gifted like that.  Occasionally you pretended not to hear me, so I would say it again.  Sometimes you would squeeze my hand; sometimes you would put the book down and immediately hug me.  Sometimes you would huff and puff.  Inevitably I would get you to say it back.  You knew I was going to bug you, you knew I just wanted to say hello, you probably knew that sometimes it was just spoken out of my own insecurity – seeking your reassurances and the safety of us.   The end result was always the same, you would stop, say it back and just like that you would strengthen our bond.  I was just probably seeking the reassurance that you were there, that I was not alone, that I was not dreaming it, that I did have you, and put every other worry in context.     It was a simple gesture really, just me saying hello or hi to you but with so much weight, so much significance, all enough to cripple me now that it’s no longer.  It could have been triggered by any of the hundreds of worries that would randomly occupy my mind.  I cannot do anything but feel my own skin shrink when I hear you saying it back.  Most of the times it was just simply an expression of love.  Most of the times it was simply the two of us stopping and kicking the world out and acknowledge each other.

I never thought I would miss saying hi.  I hate saying it now.   I am so scared you may know you are dead or not with us anymore and I am terrified you are feeling lonely.  I couldn’t care less about god, after life or spirituality, energy or matter at present – those types of questions are not what I am trying to answer.  I just need to know that there is no awareness as even contemplating the fact that there may be sends me into full crash mode.  It terrifies me more than the prospect that I will not see you again, that I have lost you and your smile.  Because if you do have any awareness of it than there is nothing I can do to protect you, to hold you, to make you feel like you are not and will never be on your own. I cannot say hello and bug you.  I cannot touch you or kiss your neck 100s of times in a few minutes.  Worst of all, there is nothing I can do to keep you safe, to carry you, to share your burden, to make it my own, to be your strength when you need it.  It is the one thing my love cannot do and I feel like a cheat, like the biggest let down that has ever existed.  It is the point where I cannot honor my promise to stand by you, to be your husband, your best friend and to share everything.  I just want to know you have no awareness, that there is absolutely nothing after life, so that the pain is only mine.  I don’t get it.  I want to scream but even if I do it changes nothing.   I keep remembering the times you would grab me and ask me not to leave, to stay with you longer or to hurry and come back.  The Christmas morning you texted me to please come back from the cash point so we could spend more time together.    I pray that is not how you feel right now.   I hope that is not how you feel, because it is exactly how I feel.  And it doesn’t matter how many times I tell you to come back, to hurry up, and to turn around, to stay with me, to not leave.  You can’t.  You won’t.  I am alone.  Just standing here with no hope.   I am absolutely powerless even if I know you wouldn’t want to be away from me if you could choose.  I wish I could rip the universe to pieces so that I can grab you wherever you are, so that I can bug you and say hi.  I also cannot stop thinking that we may just be in two different places and are looking for each other in every corner, in every gesture.   I don’t want you to panic because you cannot find me, and I don’t want to panic anymore.   It is exhausting and debilitating, I will never ever understand why you are not here.  I will never ever understand the point of life if this is what it boils down to.  I am scared to look up anytime I walk down the street, scared yet again I will not see you walking towards me.   I don’t want you to feel any of this.  But I am scared you may.  And than my mind and heart decide to work together and trick me into thinking one day I will look up and will see you.  I craft these incredible stories of what may have happened.  All are short of pure insanity.  They never really work out in the details but I couldn’t care less.  What I need now is the only thing I cannot have: hope.  Hope to see you, to feel you, to hear your heart beat, to feel the warmth of your hands, the loudness of your snoring, the staggering beauty of your eyes.

Most of the times I just push all the thoughts back and try to ignore they are there, but what for?  Why do I have to be scared to speak about my darkest fears? How could I not go there?  How could I just not think about it?  So I’ve got to find a way to answer my question and to shine light into all the twists and turns and dark corners of my mind or heart, which by the way, have now just melted together.  My heart is consoling my brain and my brain is hugging my heart.  Neither of them experience any result even nearing success, but both inevitably realise they have been blown out and are in pieces, one as wounded as the other is.

And so I continue to say hello, hi.  To myself, to the walls, to the sky, to the dog, to the kitties, to our walks, to our places, to our home, to your clothes, to your photos, to anything that will not repeat it outloud and will not judge me for not giving up on you.

I love you.  I will continue to say hi to you for the rest of my life.

PS.  Still listening to the same song

Your blog, our life, my words

Today song was Secret Love Song by Little Minx

I have no idea why I am writing to you and for you on your blog.  It defeats reason but I have been dealing with reason and facts for the last few weeks and I need some escape from this onslaught of reality.

I never thought I loved you this much.  I never thought it could be possible to love someone this much.  I never expected to love you more in death than in life.  My life right now feels like someone filled up a balloon and forgot the pump was running until it filled it up completely.  The fabric has stretched so far it has exploded and, yet, somehow is still filling up.  Every time the balloon I am in explodes, I discover I am inside another bigger one and so on and so on.  I said after you died that my life as I knew it ended when yours did.  I had no clue the change would be so deep, wide and transforming.  I never understood the meaning of pain until I close my eyes and I see you on the floor hoping I can tell you off, hoping I can save you, hoping your eyes will open and you will say “Hi pengu”, hoping my every dream has just not been shuttered, hoping that everyone around me is lying.  I just wanted to protect you, for you to not be alone, for you to somehow know that I was there, that I was standing up for you, that I need you to breathe and be happy, I would have stood by you for eternity if I could have.  I hope somewhere you know and I hope I did all that you would have wanted me to do.

I never appreciated until now the hidden cost of all ours dreams and aspirations and achievements.  Never even thought they had one.  You taught me their rewards when we started falling in love with each other, but there was no mention of the depth and destruction that could come.  No that it would have changed anything.  I would have done everything all over again, with the same intensity, with the same commitment, with the same dedication.  I have no regrets.  I loved you fully every day and so did you.  Having no regrets is such a powerful arm when dealing with my grief.  I can blow the irrational theory of the stages of grief right out of the window and free myself from constraints on how I should be feeling like.

You and I made every dream come true.  But I can now feel the brutal cost of happiness when death takes it.  Of course I am lucky, blessed or whatever word anyone wants to use to describe my “gratitude” for having given the chance to know what selfless, difficult, rewarding, happy, transforming, inspiring love means.  But I feel that is also a bit of a lie.  Gratitude?  What for?  It was hard work, worth it but I am not going to pretend I feel somewhat special and gifted for having a strong relationship.  I worked extremely hard on it.  We both did.  Of course we were happy, of course I felt amazing with you next to me and in the comfort of ourselves.  But we both had to overcome a lot of things to be there and really love and accept each other.  The idea that a relationship is somewhat easy or luck is nonsense.  Nothing pisses me off more than when someone hints that our relationship was a gift.  No, it was earned and built day by day.  It was complete trust and complete surrender to each other in a way that can only be achieved by standing up for the relationship every day.  A relationship is made by challenges, by the failures that define the successes that will follow.  Those failures and successes is what made us a family, is what defined our marriage as a union between us.

At first, after you died, it was colours that looked different, than it was the air I was breathing.  Now it’s my whole body changing, with my neurons being yet again rewired into something totally new.   You rewired me once already.  It’s probably the reason why I am not scared of any of it.  I know this is as much linked to you as the first one was and I will go wherever you take me.  I will watch it rebuilding me, resetting my values, reframing my life, my goals, my beliefs, and my priorities.  I am floating above this surreal place that no longer has you in it, watching, feeling, understanding, but not moving.  Not yet.  I cannot do that.  I always thought I was driving the process of growth and change in my life, but no, this is not something I can drive, stop, control or manipulate.  I am no fighting it; I am just letting it take me over and transforming the reality.

The one thing I know inside me is that you would have fought hard to allow me to be just like I am in this moment and do absolutely nothing.  You would have understood why I need to let hit me and transform me.  Or if you didn’t understand it, you would have stood your ground to let me anyways.

Whenever I tried to fight it I end up feeling powerless and insignificant. I always thought I needed to let go of myself and all the controls I tried to put on me.  I had no idea this would be the thing that removes my self-resistance from the equation and makes it work.

I feel us merging in me.  I see myself say things you would only say, look at people the way you would, wanting to carry on things you believed in.  I hate it, because it means I am processing your death.  And I can’t hide behind words.  I promised you on that day I would do everything we would have and I will.  I know I have to carry on.  I know you would want me to, but I fucking hate it.  The pain of leaving us behind is so excruciating I cannot move sometimes.  The pain of not been able to smile when you hold me at night and tell you I love you hundreds of times in a day is the single most destructing change in my life.  I promised you a few months ago I would tell you I love you hundreds of thousand of times in our life time.  No one will ever know how happy we were to just text each other how much we “lovinsed” each other every few minutes we were apart.

The amount of information, connections, thoughts and feelings I have to process is endless.  I laughed at my past thoughts and myself today.  As I remember that about 10 months ago I wrote on Facebook I didn’t know if I was a tree withstanding the storm with its root or a diamond being forged by pressure.  I thought moving was going to be my biggest challenge.  Than I thought than my dad having a stroke was going to define the hardest few months of my life.  I than learned that you were going to fight your own health battle and all I wanted was to be near you, to hold you when you didn’t want to be held, to take on your fears, to fight for you and with you.  Even if we were years away from that moment, I started to plan how I would be able to donate one of my kidneys for you.   You didn’t want me to.  I told you off and told you to allow me to love you and protect you.  You agreed.

Than I found you at the bottom of the stairs with blood on the floor.  I remember holding your head and look at you.   No one will ever know what that moment did to me.  The love I felt rushing through me.  That instict I needed to do everything I could to protect you and keep you safe for as long as I could.

What tree?  What diamond?  Possibly I now feel more like a supernova, the energy being released is so destructive yet life forming.  So many new elements are being created that I yet cannot see.  But I feel them.  Although I am dealing with death, I also feel life.  It’s an oxymoron I have to live with, but I do feel like there is no point to life although I have nothing but intention to live.

I miss you.  I miss your kindness.  I miss how protective of me you were.  I miss how much I knew you loved me.  I miss how much I felt you loved me.  I simply miss you.  Every second, every thought, every breath.

 

What Do The Swivel-Eyed Loons Want?

It seems that grassroots Tories come in for a lot of stick these days; the liberal, left-leaning media laugh at them, their friends join UKIP or the BNP, and even their leader doesn’t seem to like them very much.

One of the main things they’re criticised for is being anti pretty much everything and not really pro anything. The main thing that seems to come of journalists asking your everyday Tory what they want is a list of things they don’t want – no to gay marriage, no to Europe, no to the 21st century. I thought it might be nice to give their more positive views an airing, and by positive views I simply mean the ones that feature the word ‘no’ the fewest times.

So, what kinds of things are they after, what is it that makes an on-the-ground, grassroots, home counties-living Tory tick? What are the things they want to see happen, rather than just the usual list of things they don’t want anywhere near them, but especially not in their back yards? Below are some suggested policies.

More Returns
Grassroots conservatives just love returns to stuff; whether it’s the golden age of education (roughly somewhere in the 50s/60s/whenever they were growing up), the golden age of society (similarly placed, although with more reference to ‘incomers’ and ‘immigration’), proper family values (pre-1970s, before the pill made women all uppity and ruined everything), or anything else that sounds positive and can’t really be pinned down to a specific time or an objective description.

We must return to everything so that everything can be as good as it was when things were really good, which they definitely aren’t now, but were at some point in the past which can’t be accurately pinpointed but can be described variously as ‘golden’, ‘halcyon’ and, more often than not, ‘hazy’.

More Tradition
This country is built on a proud tradition of traditions and keeping traditions alive is the only way to ensure that our traditional way of life remains traditional well into the future (which we don’t like).

Tradition is, of course, an excellent way to cover up all kinds of prejudice and discrimination. ‘Traditional family values’ is a really neat way of saying ‘no sluts or gays to have access to babies’ and describing what used to be the ‘traditional British way of life’ is a fabulously underhanded way of saying ‘before all the darkies got here’.

Returning to traditional ways of doing everything would be best for everyone, it would stop the degradation of the moral fabric of society and ensure that Britain continued being British in a way that can only be described as truly traditional, and British. As long as those traditions don’t include major industry, trade unions, or the removing of monarchs’ heads.

More History
You know what the future is? No. Nobody does.

The future is a place where we don’t know what’s going to happen. Nobody knows what’s going to happen in the future, so why should we want, like or welcome it? We must fear the future and any change it may bring, and instead must cling to the past; it’s perfectly obvious what happened in the past, lots of people who were there recorded it and we know exactly how it went.

Repeating history over and over again is the only way forward that ensures complete predictability and, therefore, safety and comfort. All history should commence being repeated forthwith and all new ideas should be consigned to history, ironically enough in this instance never to be seen or heard from again.

More Independence
Britain should be free to do what Britain wants whenever Britain wants to. Sod being controlled by a load of bureaucrats (more like eurocrats, arf) in Brussels, we should take back our independence and independently work on being independent more and more.

We should not consider that another word for ‘independent’ is ‘alone’ and we should not consider any arguments which go against independence. Working with the fabric of something from within is ridiculous, we can only change things by leaving in a huff and then sniping from the sidelines.

This, of course, does not apply to Scotland, who will bloody well do as they’re told.

Returning To Traditional And Historical Independence
So, there we have it, grassroots Tories want Britain to head back in time to an undefined period when things were, in a traditional manner, very positive and everything was going really well (for them).

Any consideration for other members of society who did not enjoy a more austere, strict and conservative country musty be swept aside by the noting that these are ‘not traditional’ and are also, in many ways, a threat to Britain’s independence.

Now, what about that sounds lunatic to you?

Thatcher In The Wind

Since this is, after all, a lefty blog and since I’ve got the balanced and reasonable view out of the way… I thought I’d make some suggestions in case Sir Elton wants to sing at this funeral too.

Goodbye Maggie T
You were a mortal after all
We thought you were a cyborg
Making those you came from crawl
They crawled out of the mines and yards
And they cried in hunger and pain
They meant nothing to you
And you sold them out for gain

chorus

And it seems to me you lived your life
Like a bitch that no-one liked
Never knowing who to fire next
When the doubts set in
And I would have liked to have kicked you
But I was just a kid
The coal was burned out long before
You stole milk from those kids

Motherhood was tough
The toughest role you ever played
You created monsters
Of greed and pride and hate
Even when you died
Oh the Right still worshiped you
All the PM had to say
Was that you saved ‘us’ from ‘ourselves’

[repeat chorus]

Goodbye Maggie T
Take the stairlift, straight down to hell
You had a servant hold you
While those you came from crawled
Goodbye Maggie T
From the boy from the North East
Who sees you as something less than iron
Now you’ll be rusting in a hole

The Irony of Thatcher’s Death

In life, Margaret Thatcher was thoroughly divisive and capable of stirring stronger emotions in a wider range of people than practically any other (democratically elected) politician in history.

To the right, she was heaven sent; a hard-line, emotionless, radical conservative (a contradiction in terms, but isn’t that fitting) who also happened to be a woman, therefore serving their political and their oedipal urges in one neat, harrying package.

To the left and to those of liberal values, she was evil incarnate; a woman who trod on other women, a working class girl who hated and shit all over her own people, a milk snatcher, a union breaker, a vicious old witch.

Death has not changed this in the slightest, there is still hate from the left and there is still worship from the right; the only thing that has changed is that many conservatives are waxing lyrical about in terribly ironic ways, and seemingly not even realising they’re doing it.

For many on the left, Thatcher’s death was greeted with unadulterated joy; ding dong the witch was indeed dead. Many of us had been waiting for the moment for a long time, and were ready to celebrate on the streets, as well as on twitter, Facebook and blogs.

The backlash from the right was instantaneous and harsh; suggesting that this degree of celebration was inappropriate and that the family deserved respect at this time.

Although not something I want to dwell on, it must be noted that Carol and Mark Thatcher have never, since they turned 18 and started making their own horrifying, self-serving, vicious life choices, deserved anything even approaching respect.

The main thrust of the ‘anti-celebration’ argument has been that it is utterly appalling to celebrate the death of a poor little old lady who was very sick when she died. Whilst this is true in almost every case, it is not true here. The very person being defended is the very person who would despise this argument the most.

In short, Thatcher would be horrified.

The woman who had no pity, empathy or compassion for others being defended as a ‘poor little old lady’ is ironic in the extreme. She despised anyone ‘weak’, she despised pity and eschewed empathy in preference of policy. Having her political lifetime defended on the basis of her weakness towards the end would have kill her given the chance.

Those who are managing to avoid the pity and emotion of Thatcher’s passing but still defending her are throwing out some slightly more subtle but no less potent irony themselves. Talking heads and no-job hacks (Hi Louise Mensch!) from across the conservative spectrum have been popping up on daytime TV and 24 hour news stations to celebrate the achievements of Maggie, and what do they celebrate?

Legacy.

Legacy is the one thing about Margaret Thatcher that absolutely nobody can say went well. In fact, the repercussions and long-term after-effects of her actions and choices were the main part of her problem. The reason so many people hate her and are celebrating her death is partly the things she did and the choices she made, but it’s mainly the lifelong affect her work had on the lives of poorer people.

What she did was in many cases necessary, but she didn’t have anything in place for afterwards. To paraphrase Lord Ashdown, she was an excellent destroyer, but she didn’t have the knack for building.

In all honesty, mining did not have a massively bright future in the UK as a source of employment or GDP, some sort of action was needed to change the way income was generated in regions where mining was a major employer, and mining itself was going to have to stop eventually anyway. Ignoring all emotions about the issue, this is something most people can agree on.

Unfortunately, especially for those now claiming that her lasting impact will be her positive legacy, Thatcher closed the mines by force and replaced them with, well, nothing. Decimating communities and whole regions of the country and not offering anything to come afterwards.

This is the deep irony of these claims to legacy; the North East of England didn’t recently go back into recession with the rest of the UK, it never came out. Many parts of the country have never recovered from the actions of Mad Maggie, and this is apparently the glorious legacy we should be remembering her for.

Others talk about the right to buy. In very simple terms, and without considering the long term at all, you can make it seem really quite good; people didn’t own their own homes and then, thanks to Thatcher, they were given the chance to.

So far so good. But what happened next? What were the long-term repercussions? Take a look at the state of social housing today and you’ll see Thatcher’s marvellous legacy, consider attitudes in the UK to social housing and there’s more of her work.

Thatcher’s influence will be reaching out into British society long after her grave is cold, but none of it will be positive, whether it’s homelessness, unemployment, the disenfranchisement of the working classes, economic ruin or the collapse of community and society, Margaret’s hand will be there leading the way.

Not really anything to crow about is it?