Born Yesterday Read Online Free PDF Page A
Author: Gordon Burn
she wanted Marks and Spencer to open immediately so that delegates, many of them forced to flee wearing only carpet slippers and dressing-gowns, could replace clothes lost in the explosion.)
As she proceeds around the perimeter of the garden, Mrs T stops every so often to reach up to a drooping branch or out to a flabby rosette of leaves to apparently express her concern about how they are being affected by the weather. And it is only now I notice something that should have been obvious from the beginning: no handbag. She is without the item which came to symbolise her legendary bossiness and indomitability and which she turned into a verb: to handbag, or (more commonly) to behandbagged. She isn’t carrying one of the bucket-sized handbags which became part of her armoury. ‘Margaret Thatcher carried the authority of her office always with her. It was in her handbag,’ Douglas Hurd, her Northern Ireland, Home and Foreign Secretary at various times, once said. ‘She was asserting it the whole time’.
Even in the famous picture of her standing in the gun turret of a Saracen tank, taken after the Falklands, kitted out in hooded headscarf and fly-eye desert goggles, she has a handbag over her arm.
What is remembered in the body is well remembered. The presence of learned culture in the body, wrote Elaine Scarry, must at least in part be seen as originating in the body, attributed to the refusal of the body to disown its own early circumstances, its mute and often beautiful insistence on absorbing into its rhythms and postures the signs that it inhabits a particular space at a particular time.
It is said that within a few months of life British infants have learned to hold their eyebrows in a raised position. And a muscle memory keeps sending Mrs Thatcher’s pale, manicured right hand with its prominent wrist-bone and thin blue veins travelling along her other arm in an attempt to push the slipping strap – which of course isn’t there – back towards the clamp of her elbow.
In a similarly reflexive action, her carer’s hand constantly reaches out and hovers around the small of Mrs Thatcher’s back. It is noticeable, though, that, no matter how many times this happens, her fingers never make actual contact with the nap of the camel-hair coat nearlyidentical to her own. The women are of similar height, build and general demeanour. But for this business with the hands, anybody watching from a distance, through a hair-trigger zoom or with the naked eye, would find it difficult telling the two of them apart.
*
It is often said that today’s abundance of media images creates a screen between the individual and the world, and that this is the source of the feeling we all increasingly have of seeing everything but of being able to do nothing. The media gives us images of everything – but only images.
He had only realised Kate Middleton lived a street away, and had been living there for two or three years, when some houses that came up on the TV news looked naggingly familiar. The houses were the backdrop to pictures of the paparazzi climbing over each other to squeeze off shots of Prince William’s girlfriend as she left home for work in the morning.
Kate Middleton had started 2007, according to Princess Diana’s private secretary, Patrick Jephson, writing in the Spectator , with the year ‘stretching ahead of her like an enchanted garden’. Prince William was going to announce their engagement and she therefore would be in line to become Queen. But after a series of highly publicised paparazzi chases ominously like the one which resulted in the death of his mother, the prince announced that he and Miss Middleton had agreed, after several years as a couple, to go their separate ways. Nevertheless rumours persisted in the press about them ‘spending secret nights together’out of the media spotlight. And on Monday all the papers had run pictures of Kate Middleton sitting in the row behind Prince William at
As she proceeds around the perimeter of the garden, Mrs T stops every so often to reach up to a drooping branch or out to a flabby rosette of leaves to apparently express her concern about how they are being affected by the weather. And it is only now I notice something that should have been obvious from the beginning: no handbag. She is without the item which came to symbolise her legendary bossiness and indomitability and which she turned into a verb: to handbag, or (more commonly) to behandbagged. She isn’t carrying one of the bucket-sized handbags which became part of her armoury. ‘Margaret Thatcher carried the authority of her office always with her. It was in her handbag,’ Douglas Hurd, her Northern Ireland, Home and Foreign Secretary at various times, once said. ‘She was asserting it the whole time’.
Even in the famous picture of her standing in the gun turret of a Saracen tank, taken after the Falklands, kitted out in hooded headscarf and fly-eye desert goggles, she has a handbag over her arm.
What is remembered in the body is well remembered. The presence of learned culture in the body, wrote Elaine Scarry, must at least in part be seen as originating in the body, attributed to the refusal of the body to disown its own early circumstances, its mute and often beautiful insistence on absorbing into its rhythms and postures the signs that it inhabits a particular space at a particular time.
It is said that within a few months of life British infants have learned to hold their eyebrows in a raised position. And a muscle memory keeps sending Mrs Thatcher’s pale, manicured right hand with its prominent wrist-bone and thin blue veins travelling along her other arm in an attempt to push the slipping strap – which of course isn’t there – back towards the clamp of her elbow.
In a similarly reflexive action, her carer’s hand constantly reaches out and hovers around the small of Mrs Thatcher’s back. It is noticeable, though, that, no matter how many times this happens, her fingers never make actual contact with the nap of the camel-hair coat nearlyidentical to her own. The women are of similar height, build and general demeanour. But for this business with the hands, anybody watching from a distance, through a hair-trigger zoom or with the naked eye, would find it difficult telling the two of them apart.
*
It is often said that today’s abundance of media images creates a screen between the individual and the world, and that this is the source of the feeling we all increasingly have of seeing everything but of being able to do nothing. The media gives us images of everything – but only images.
He had only realised Kate Middleton lived a street away, and had been living there for two or three years, when some houses that came up on the TV news looked naggingly familiar. The houses were the backdrop to pictures of the paparazzi climbing over each other to squeeze off shots of Prince William’s girlfriend as she left home for work in the morning.
Kate Middleton had started 2007, according to Princess Diana’s private secretary, Patrick Jephson, writing in the Spectator , with the year ‘stretching ahead of her like an enchanted garden’. Prince William was going to announce their engagement and she therefore would be in line to become Queen. But after a series of highly publicised paparazzi chases ominously like the one which resulted in the death of his mother, the prince announced that he and Miss Middleton had agreed, after several years as a couple, to go their separate ways. Nevertheless rumours persisted in the press about them ‘spending secret nights together’out of the media spotlight. And on Monday all the papers had run pictures of Kate Middleton sitting in the row behind Prince William at