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

No man is an island, entire of itself; every
man is a piece of the continent, a part of the
main. If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory
were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or
of thine own were: any man's death diminishes
me, because I am involved in mankind, and
therefore never send to know for whom the bells
tolls; it tolls for thee.

At 4.10, driven to distraction by marking, I checked the BBC News website, and saw footage from a helicopter following Baroness T's journey to the Crem, with motorcycle outriders, through SW London. It took until 4.30 and I sat with a hankie to my face fighting back tears, then a student came in to ask about an essay and I had to pull myself together.

The thing was this - I was 18 when Mrs T came to power and thirty when she resigned as PM, and those are important years in anyone's life, and she was a daily presence in my life throughout them, in a way that Foot and Kinnock and Hatton and Scargill and Owen Steel Williams &c &c never could be. I had a form of political activity during those years but it wasn't for the Tories. I was never a Thatcher fan, but it is the curse of the Liberal to see both sides in an argument... Anyhow, there was so much of my youth riding there in the back of that hearse that I just had to watch and if I was crying it was as much for myself as for anyone else - hence the John Donne above.

The thing that was fascinating was watching people going about their business as the cortege drove by. A football game was going on and the players were behind a fence and couldn't see the road. Some people stopped to look, others went about their business. Did they know what was passing them by? Which put me in mind of Shelley:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

On a poetic bent, Peet's journal for yesterday described a person from Porlock situation.

At Uni this evening I put on a showing of the Tennant Hamlet. Day spent listening to Joni.


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