Fewer stars and ovations please

Margaret Thatcher, greyish fair hair neatly combed and her pointed school marm-ish face almost smiling, stood chirpily on the steps of 10 Downing Street in London. It was May 1979 and she had just become Britain’s first – and so far only – woman prime minister. She was, as always, triumphantly holding a handbag. This was none of your gray-suited, gray-haired, gray-minded males that Britain was accustomed to. Mrs T was a flesh and blood female.   Her face powder, perfume and lipstick-containing handbag – badge of a certain sort of womanly wiliness – proved it.

Democracy?

Not that she’d elected by the people like a US president.  Not a bit of it.  That’s not what the Brits mean by democracy. The Great British Public votes only once in each general election – for a member of parliament to represent their region in the House of Commons at Westminster. And each MP is a member of a political  party. Elected MPs decide who is going to lead their party. Then the leader of the party which has won the most ‘seats’ (actually they’re aren’t enough chairs to go round if they all turn up at once) in parliament at an election is invited by The Queen to form a government and to become Prime Minister.

Call to the Palace

Margaret Thatcher had become leader of the Conservative Party – traditionally the guys who want private enterprise and free choice – in February 1975. So when her lot romped home with a big parliamentary majority in the 1979 election, Margaret’s day had come. She and her handbag trotted gleefully off to the Palace for a heart-to-heart with Her Majesty and hey presto, Britain had its first woman prime minister. And it was clear from the beginning who was in charge. ‘I don’t mind how much my ministers talk, as long as they do what I say,’ she said in 1980.

Grocer’s daughter

Margaret Hilda Roberts was born in Grantham – a Lincolnshire town about 55 miles north-west of Cambridge – on 13 October 1925. Her dad was a grocer in the town, so she was no privileged product of the English class system.  But she was clever and knew it.  When, aged 9, she won a poetry reading competition and was told by her school’s principal that she was lucky to win she replied:  ‘I wasn’t lucky. I deserved it.’

Clever clogs

She was awarded a scholarship to Kesteven and Grantham Girls High School which gave her a solid old fashioned education – lots of spelling, reckoning and reading.  Chemistry was her thing and in in 1943 she hurried off to Somerville College Oxford to study it.   And, maybe influenced by the biscuit selling father back home who was involved in local politics and had been Mayor of Grantham, it didn’t take her long to join the Oxford University Conservative Association. Ever one to be in charge of things, she soon became its president.

Workaholic?

Famously she had eons of  energy and needed very little sleep – which is just as well because she can’t have had much time for it in her 20s.   She worked for four years as a research chemist after graduation from Oxford, studying law at the same time with the intention of becoming a barrister. She stood unsuccessfully for parliament in 1950 and 1951 and married businessman Denis Thatcher in 1951. Then, in 1953 she managed to produce twins and to complete her law studies so that she was ‘called to the bar’ as a specialist taxation lawyer by Lincolns Inn in 1954.

Thatcher the milk snatcher

Her political career really took off in 1959 when she was elected Member of Parliament for Finchley, North London.  She held a whole string of offices within her party and became Secretary of State for Education and Science when her party was returned to Office in 1970. ‘Thatcher the milk snatcher,’ they called her because she stopped the long-established practice of offering British kids a daily dinky little bottle of free milk at school.

Rod of iron

As Prime Minister, despite the femininity of her handbag, she had a reputation for masculine toughness and determination. ‘The Iron lady’ firmly quashed the Argentine invasion of the (British) Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic in 1982 with plenty of troops and no shilly-shallying.  At home she refused to allow the trade unions to tell her and her government what they should do with the country’s money. She believed that money was the key to peace and prosperity. ‘Pennies don’t fall form heaven – they have to be earned on earth’ she told a newspaper in 1979   ‘No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions. He had money as well’ she said in a 1986 TV interview.

Royal we?

In 1989 she told the press that ‘We have become a grandmother’ – a slip of the tongue which led to delighted accusation of delusions or royal grandeur. The use of the royal  ‘we’ (she presumably meant herself and Denis)

sounded like the old royal custom of using ‘we’ instead of ‘I’. Had she got so carried away that she thought she was more important than the Queen?

Brighton bomb

During her 11 years at Downing Street she made a new record by becoming the only British prime minister ever to stay in office when her party won three consecutive elections.  But there were some very difficult times. In 1984 a terrorist planted a bomb in a Brighton hotel where the Conservative Party was holding its annual conference. Five senior members of the party were killed and several seriously injured. ‘Now it must be business of usual’ Mrs Thatcher told the world grimly a few hours later.

Treachery

She was eventually ousted as party leader (‘treachery with a smile on its face’ she said bitterly) in 1990. She was awarded the Order of Merit as a consolation prize by the Queen a month later. In 1992 she became Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven and, in 1995, a member of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. So you could say the class system caught up with her in the end.

The end

Margaret Thatcher died in 2013 after a long and lonely period as a widow with Alzheimer’s disease. Meryl Streep depicts this period very skilfully in the 2011 film The Iron Lady. Many Brits loathed Margaret Thatcher and her death was greeted with a strange mixture of glee and sadness.

Most birds fly. So do insects and bats. But did you know that some squirrels, lizards,  frogs  and snakes have also taken to the air?

Remember Dumbo the flying elephant? And we all know about all those wonderful things which might happen when pigs fly. Well, take a stroll in the jungles of Borneo next time you’re passing that way.  You won’t – unless you’ve had a drop too much of the local date brandy or palm wine  –  see pigs and elephants defying gravity  but you could well see a squirrel gliding thought the air.

Soaring squirrels

The aeronautical squirrel – address him as Petauristinae if you’re feeling formal – lives with his mate in a hole high up  in some tall tropical tree. He’s a handsome guy wearing a rich russet fur coat which looks as if was bought for a bigger chap.  In the late afternoon he and his wife scamper out for a bit of exercise – running along the bark  using their needle sharp claws like rock climbers’ pitons.

Then they begin to circle the tree trunk frenetically, Suddenly and quite unexpectedly the pair of them take off, first one and then the other  like a two part squadron.  Together they glide effortlessly and silently up to 35 yards through the air toward the next tree.  During the flight all four limbs are stretched out tightly and  the baggy overcoat  reveals itself as a useful  flat membrane attached at  wrist and ankle.

They  have evolved  fairly  light bones and  their ‘flight’ is a way  of moving from tree to tree in a dark  forest hundreds of feet below the leafy canopy  where the long trunks are  straight and lower branches are few and far between.   It’s really more  of a supported  jump – similar to hang gliding – than to true flight.

The aerodynamics are effective The fat furry tail is  a good rudder. So steering looks after itself. Once Mr and Mrs Squirrel are  within striking distance of the landing stage they  swoop sharply  upwards. Thus they hit the trunk running and can gallop away into the forest canopy  like aircraft touching down on  a vertical  runway.

Gliding  lizards

In the same forest you might chance on Draco, the flying lizard. His hang-gliding mechanism consists of a couple of neat  of flaps  of skin which  stick out from either flank, furled in like roller blinds against his body. They are stiffened  by  bony rib extensions evolved for the purpose.

When he gets the flying urge he pulls his ribs forward. That yanks the ribs apart and  distends the flaps like and aircraft swivelling its wing flaps. Take-off sends Draco  gliding cheerfully from liana to liana and from branch to branch. From underneath the flying flaps  look like huge diaphanous insect wings.  It’s a lot quicker – and safer because most predators can’t get at you if you’re air-borne – than landing  on the forest  floor and skittering across  to another tree.

Frogs aloft 

Keep an eye 0ut for flying frogs too. Not many frogs have parachutes on their feet but Rhacophorus does.  Extra long toes mean that the webbing he generally uses for fast swimming has evolved to be  much larger than that of his common-or-garden froggy cousins.

When he leaps  he can cover considerable  distances  because his mega-webbing keeps him air-borne.  It means that  he can get from leaf to leaf without putting himself  at risk or using too much energy as he goes about his amphibian  business in the tropical forests of Borneo.

Volitant (now there’s a nice word!) snakes

Chrysopelea, the flying snake,  is such a strange beast that for a long time no one believed in him. He was dismissed as a delusion invented by over enthusiastic early  explorers. But he’s real enough.

He’s a small, thin, quietish sort of serpent, although very beautiful with greenish- blue scales flecked with gold and red. Most of the time he whizzes skilfully  up and down vertical tree trunks at top speed.

When he fancies  piloting  himself across to another tree for a change of scenery  he races along a branch and throws himself off.  In the air he flattens his body like a piece of  ribbon which catches the air and enables  it to travel  much further than if it just fell.  The physics are neatly evolved because  most snakes’  bodies are cylindrically rounded.  In ‘flight’ or glide the snake wriggles his  flat length into a series of curly coils which gives him a bit of control  over direction and landing site.