50, why'd'ya say 50?

Luke, why’d’ya hav’ta say fifty eggs?

Strange, beautiful, funny and sad, Cool Hand Luke is wonderful. Southern Gothic prison drama. It’s one of those films that, every so often, I feel the need to watch again.

There’s a large amount of money riding on whether Luke can get fifty eggs down his neck. One of those skinny guys with a big appetite (I was one of those, once, long, long ago), his backers massage his distended belly, offer encouragement, and force the last few hard boiled eggs down, while he paces, sits, stands, lays down, and looks increasingly uncomfortable.

The point is the recklessness of the challenge. “I can eat fifty eggs”. The outcome does not matter, epic success or heroic failure. With such a level of audacity and madness, taking it on counts for more than the end result.

Lady Bracknell’s funeral

One of the several bees that inhabited Maggie Thatcher’s bonnet was lame ducks. She had no time for lame ducks, hated them. Businesses, workers, community, society, mums, dads, everyone and everything came down to the bottom line, pounds shillings and pence. Exhibit a trace of a limp, and you were for the pot. Zero tolerance.

Now. There’s no duck more lame than the demented, frail old lady. She serves no purpose, not under the analytical framework Maggie favoured. She only has needs: medical, social, requirements for help and support. Her bottom line’s right into the negative red-zone of the hop along lame. I hope she looked in the mirror, and her nasty, vindictive, compassionless brain recognised that she’d become the very thing she hated.

I also hope she realised that any number of the miners, shipbuilders, and other men employed in the industries she destroyed are still big, strong, healthy and vigorous, and by no means lame. Able to put frail old lady lame ducks out of their misery with a lazy flick of a powerful hand.

The Iron Lady claim is rubbish, too. In those terms she was a joke. An aunt from a Wodehouse story, a Lady Bracknell, with that awful strident or condescending tone of voice and absolute belief that she and her retinue of sycophants were right and everyone else was wrong, she was a caricature, a living Spitting Image puppet, Hyacinth Bucket, Margo from The Good Life, the headmistress from Please Sir. No wonder she hated football, the game, the players and the fans.

I’ve some questions:

First, every time politicians are questioned, they play the democratically elected card. Yet they will not take on board that a significant proportion of the population hated her, continue to hate her and her legacy, and object to tuppence from the public coffers being spent on a send-off, let alone ten million quid.

Second, just as much as she hated big, strong, working men, she loved and revered the brutish, Bollinger-swilling bankers. Exactly the people who have the world in the mess it’s in, how come the blame isn’t laid at her door?

Third, isn’t cynically engaging in a pointless but popular war to earn another term in power, despicable beyond belief?