Thursday, April 11, 2013

Coeval sympathy

Wednesday’s Times carried, on its front page, a picture of Margaret Thatcher & Her Majesty the Queen taken at the CHOGM held in Lusaka in 1979.

Both women were then in their early 50s but I was astonished at how young – to my eye – they both now look. Another example of the strange way in which everybody else looks younger as you yourself grow older.

I have also only now realised how very close together they were in age – Thatcher the elder by about 6 months.

The death of someone your own age has a particular resonance & may play no small part in the Queen’s decision to attend the funeral. That, plus the fact that Margaret Thatcher remains our only female prime minister, plus (I like to think)  feelings of sisterly regard for another who had to put up with all those male political animals, rather than anything to do with her politics & policies as such, informs the decision.

The picture also shows how, at that early stage of her premiership, Mrs Thatcher had not yet learned to eschew fussy prints, or to impose an iron discipline on her hair.

Link
Lusaka Declaration on Racism and Racial Prejudice (Issued at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting,Lusaka, Zambia, 1979)
Related post
Looking your age