h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Our Marketing Manager is a young tyro. A pretty decent bloke actually, albeit one with the annoying habit of having more hours in his day than I have. Today he found some relics in a storeroom. It's well known that I like relics, so I got first peek.

One is enclosed in a rather swish faux leather brief in Oxford blue, and the contents are a two-page typewritten memorandum of understanding. Among the signatures on the document is that of Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister. It's dated October 1981, and it records the Sicartsa plate mill contract. That project was a bit of a scandal in its day:
http://www.threegorgesprobe.org/probeint/OdiousDebts/OdiousDebts/chapter8.html
but it saved a lot of people's jobs in Davy, the precursor business of my present employer. I would probably have been out of a job myself if it wasn't for Margaret, though I knew little of what was going on at the time. I was making a mess of the Finnish steel industry at the time.

They never built the mill in Mexico, incidentally. It was delivered to the customer, but most of it was never taken out of its packing cases. Fifteen years later it was finally built, and operates to this day, at Dongkuk Steel in South Korea.

Strange world, innit? I've half-convinced myself that the latest reason for Orgreave unacceptability is that the BBC feels obliged to be super-deferent to the half-dead. And here's fate conspiring to remind me that I owe the dreadful old bat something myself.