Guten Morgan!: Mrs. Thatch!

Guten Morgan!: Mrs. Thatch!

Mrs. Thatch!

Press coverage around 'The Iron Lady' has shrieked of a conspiracy, a right wing glossing over of Mrs. Thatcher's dark side. The film's makers have even been accused of, duh, duh, DUHHHH, humanizing Britain's only female PM. The truth is, it does, and that's no bad thing.

If you don't like 'The Iron Lady', that's fine. It's not your cup of tea. You may carp about its lack of historical detail, or even accuracy. You might wish, it focused on the miners' strike rather than on Thatcher in the advanced stages of dementia, talking with her dead husband Denis.

Most of the objections to this film are simplistic and ideologically based. They think she was an evil negative force in the world and want their viewpoint to be given celluloid validation. They're not looking at the actual film,which although superficially about a major political figure is actually about the transitory nature of fame and power.

A case in point, the controversial scene where Thatcher goes to buy milk a the beginning of the film. Scurrying back to with her shopping, bemused and confused, what's clear is that Thatcher, like many of the elderly, is invisible to the rest of us. Her battles, her passions and her considerable fame, such as it was, are irrelevant to the majority of the population alive today. Even her son Mark lives abroad and has no intention of coming to visit 'Another time perhaps', she suggests when he calls. As with many elderly parents hoping to see their children, even the longest serving British PM of the 20th century lacks definitive powers of persuasion with her absent son.

Britain's current leader, whom Thatcher, played by Oscar-bound Meryl Streep, calls 'quite a smoothy', will go the same way.

The last vestiges of her former glory surround her: the official portrait on her kitchen wall, the secretary half-heartedly leafing through her Filofax for appointments, these are physical manifestations of the obscurity all people are destined for.

Some bits of the film are inspired, others not so. Her early years are brilliantly captured, and it wasn't all good. However, portraying Thatcher as instrumental in ending the Cold War (she was famously opposed to German reunification, the final political act of the Cold War) is just wrong. It also skirts over her internal conflicts with the Heathites in her party, which could have truncated her leadership had it not been for the Falklands War.

Some viewers also mightn't get all the historical minutiae, and that's a shame. Dealing with it would make a great film, or a long one depending on how good it's rendered, but that's another film, not currently showing in Omniplexes around the world.

If the film's director, writer and stars all argue that the film is apolitical, it's not to hide an unpalatable political narrative, it's just the film isn't particularly political. Thatcher's family and friends have also been frosty about the film, so it's hardly the hagiography it might be construed as being. Furthermore, the charge of humanizing Thatcher, the same charge leveled at the makers of 'Downfall' about Bruno Ganz's depiction of Hitler, is an outrageous distortion of Thatcher's term in Downing Street. She may have been, in the words of Ben Elton, a 'nasty old witch', but she was a democratically elected 'nasty old witch', who respected and understood the cut and thrust of democratic politics, and thrived on it. And was shown the door by it.

Incidentally, for an accurate account of Thatcher's years in power, google BBC's documentary, 'Thatcher: The Downing Street Years'. For an entertaining, semi-fictitious drama about a significant historical figure, watch The Iron Lady.

GE11 - it's the Big one!!

I'm working on it okay??!!!!!

The Election's off to a hectic start, and just about everyone has an opinion on what'll happen. From Fintan O'Toole to the fool who said on Twitter that Labour were a civil war party, they're all at it. I will as well. God knows how to make it funny, but we'll figure it out... 


the absurdest of times calls for the seriousest of debates. It's not what we'll get, but we might just stumble ona few truths along the way. .

The End - a Kenny

It's truly a matter of some skill: the implosion of FG the face of the least popular government in the history of the state. Only the blueshirts could, like Ronnie Rosenthal, hoof the ball into the car park when all that's in their way is a lot of net. This is of course not the first time that FG lost its bottle in the face of flatline polls. The problem is, though, not the polls or Enda Kenny per se. It's their judgement to begin with.

Having lost the country's most famous economics commentator, having sidelined the young and restless in the FG family (Please, if anyone finds Lucinda Creighton, then contact the papers before she ends up on the side of a milk carton), after letting Leo Varadkar speak in public ever, it can only be said that they have neither the guts nor the guile to lead anyone, let alone themselves. So it's now a choice between Eamon Gilmore and a Labour front bench as familiar as the Angelus at tea time or Brian Cowen. Will it be whiskey or the gun?

Go on the real super eagles!!

Okay, so I'm biased. But like it or lump it, I'm rooting for Germany. Australians may find that comment funny, but this is just getting serious.

Germany have the youngest team since 1934, when the coach was a bespectacled Nazi called Otto Nerz. These days it's a dandy called Jogi, and the mentality is more attractive than in those dark days of the 1930's: is it typically German though? They want to win. Check. They have a focussed training program. Check. They wear snazzy white jerseys. Check. After that, it gets more interesting.

Contrary to the lazy assumptions of many people, the Germans aren't gong to win on the back of mythical eficiency. They'll be a glorious, romantic mess, and, yes, they'll get through the group stages demonstrating that they are resilient, resourceful and willing to give it their all. But they're not efficient and haven't been in two decades. It's going to be way more interesting than that.

This is just about as good as it gets for the world Cup, where every macth so far has been as dull as the drone of a Vuvuzela. A Young, hungry and slightly ramshackle German side against an Aussie selection of seasoned pros, who'll bring the game to them with guile and no little style. Thankfully Croatia aren't playing, so they have no obstacles but their own will to win.

In the end, I'll be shouting for the Germans. They need at least a couple of fans from our part of the world, so bring it on.     

Nachdenken ueber Rudolf G. With apologies to Christa Wolf

My uncle Paul put it best. We can't afford to lose any more gentlemen. So it was true of my grandfather, Rudolf Garmatz, nicknamed 'Apo', whose name I still haven't deleted from my phone, a thoroughly modern activity that people must perform when someone dies. I don't think I ever will, nor do I want to. Not out of melodrama, but because he should still be alive. It suited him so.

The man I was conscious of as my grandfather began quietly, and ended quietly. In actual fact he'd been born in the middle of a storm in 1919. To me, as a small child, he was the quiet one. The first phase of this perceived silence, was because he was so in awe of my grandmother, that he couldn't get a word in, if he wanted to at all. He worshipped her until she died in 1992, and then she left him unexpectedly, and with characteristic panache, alone. For the first time since 1946, the year he met her, he opened his mouth.

Anyone who met him was suitably impressed. Exceedingly well read, and clever enough to have processed his reading, he had the ability to talk to you about anything and always assume you knew what he was talking about, without that awful knack of lesser people, who rub your nose in the slightly less scant knowledge they possess. Perhaps it's because he never assumed to know as much as he actually did. I only ever saw it in one other person, Brian Jacob, a Geologist who, like Rudolf, the world could have done with for a few more years.

Rudolf was a man's - and woman's - man. He could speak as easily to Franconian Farmers as to Paul McGrath or Helmut Schmidt. He could say enough to be interesting but leave showing off to everyone else.

The sheer span of his life, his 90 years, a colleague commented, took in so much of what we call history. He called it his generation's "absence of normality". He remembered the hyperinflation as a small child in 1924, took in a lot more in the years after - the Hitler period, war, the everafter; Some things we knew about, other things, we found in envelopes, were curated over a lifetime: official letters from places no longer existing like Stettin, ending in "Heil Hitler" lie next to postcards from army comrades and drinking pals in Berlin in the early 40s. North Africa, medals, pictures of a dashing man in uniform - he was still regarded as something to look at until well on in his life; Postcards from his girlfriend, my grandmother, a pair of smart, emryonic hippies. Wirtschaftswunder, cars and work, the union work, "Scheiss GEW" as my grandmother thundered. Other stuff emerged from the envelopes - the secret life of a polymath, letters to the asking him demonstrate a slide rule he'd invented for the newly established West German Army. They didn't need it after all - neither did he need them as it happened. He wrote Maths books instead. He loved the creativity of Mathematics like no teacher I ever encountered in Ireland: games, a counting method using your hands like a rudimentary binary code: Leibniz for the playground.

Those yellowed photos and notes you dredge up from a box in the attic of your mind are in death, what you survey as the debris of a lifetime, partly in fascination, partly in horror, partly in joy. To every raised eyebrow, every 'wow', he sits in his chair saying, 'Oh that', or some Teutonic growl like that. No man ever rolled the letter R quite like him, nor did any man play down his own contribution to the world as effectively.

In the last decade of his life, we'd go to his birthdays because we knew - though we tried to ignore it, that not many more might come along. Not that we let on to him. Anyway, if he cared that there weren't, he hid it well. He had the dignity that allows a man to do what he likes, without the slightest hint of self consciousness. As if he didn't mind what people thought, but he'd wear a shirt and tie anyway. The man could drink without the affliction of looking like it was a dirty activity, and give you a great time without you noticing, always with ice cream soaked in Bailey's to sweeten the deal.

When a loved one lives in another country, it's hard to explain, especially to Irish people, how they can be close to you. I'd say in the last weeks of his life "My grandfather's 90, and he's not feeling so well", a look of sympathy would be replaced very soon with a blank stare, as understanding was replaced with 'who-gives a shit', when it turned out he lived several hundred miles away in Hamburg. He might as well have not existed as far as they were concerned. Sure wasn't he foreign?

That's why I was angry when he died, in the midst of a storm, as it happens, peacefully in a hospital in Klein Flottbek. The storm caused a rush of wind to blow the flagpole down outside his, now his son's, home.

It was hard to explain why I'd be upset - "sure wasn't he far away anyway, and you can't be close to just anybody?" For the misty-eyed Irish, not being able to understand the irrelevance of location is as maddening as it is perplexing. They of all people should have understood. To dwell on how the place of my birth let me down yet again, however, wouldn't have been Rudolf's style, which is another reason why I'm not half the man he was. And writing it in a blog would have drawn a whithering response from him anyway.

So as I think about him, I consider many things, some the self indulgent rubbish that bereaved people consider on the way from Miss Havisham to getting up for work: how I'd lost a father figure that no one, not even my own dad could have been - he was a daddy, not a patriarch like Rudolf. The latter outlived the former by twelve years to the hour, living exactly twice as many years.

Other things remembered are tangible. The every morning drive to the bakery, the iconoclasm of calling a bread roll a 'Schrippe' rather than the locally preferred term 'Rundstueck'; cutting up apples at the dinner table, eating cherries by a windmill next to local orchards, and spitting the stones out accross the levee towards the river Elbe and Hamburg. In silence.


After all, why ruin a good moment with chatter?

The evolution of Mary by Albert Einstein

From the online edition of the Irish Times: (about her!)

“Have I got this right? One of the wost ministers (ever) who was too lazy/stupid/unprofessional to do anything to stop the abuses in FAS - or to bring those officials in FAS to account - is now moved to a new department with FAS following her?
God help the children - the mind boggles at what calamities are coming their way.”


Even the ASTI should be able to kick her ass. Surely.





See more @ http://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/politics/2010/03/23/reshuffle-early-verdict/

Bon Anniversaire

Normally on days like this, I get a bit maudlin and ramble on about how much I miss my dad. It's true, to paraphrase Shakespeare, he was from this world untimely ripped, and we are the poorer for it. But the times of looking back with regret and sadness just aren't those of now. A man like that needs people to look ahead, the next plan, the next project and give it your all. What if he'd lived? As he would have said, 'if my aunty had balls she'd be my uncle'. So we've resumed the struggle. Mooney last week and an adventure in rural broadband next.

That's what I'm going to do to mark his 12th year of passing, of being my past, when I was someone else: I have a bag of ideas to open up,turn upside down and empty onto my living room floor. Make sense, make art make fun.

So to my dear departed da, happy anniversary. You'd have loved the future. D.

PS. if you want to see how good he was, just watch the video of him being Bertie and enjoy