Ophelia's Nun

Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots
The Lady Thatcher
an introduction
by Charles Prickens



The Lady Thatcher was a squint-eyed, skull-headed personage of five-and-seventy years, with a hairstyle reminiscent of two over-amorous Chihuahuas on the brink of Beachy Head.

Her wrinkled neck had the appearance of the long-discarded skin of a desert snake and, on frequent occasions, she had the unnerving talent for resembling nothing as much as a parrot whose singular posthumous achievement is to be the recipient of a long series of electric shocks to coax it into some kind of spasmodic action.

Indeed, Lady Thatcher’s ghoulish countenance was rendered all the more hideous by her arched and narrow nose that swiped at the air like a rusty blade; her tight mouth was stretched meanly on her sunken face like a skipping-rope that had been pulled tightly enough to strangle.

Thatcher’s askew and bulbous eyes had once been aflame with megalomania - yet now they merely fulminated with scorching bitterness and Scotch whiskey. In Lady Thatcher’s old age, a lust for attention and fearful respect had given way to a craving for liqueur. She often sat alone now, in her crumpled blue suit on a park bench in Finchley with her boney, talon-like fingers gripped white-knuckled around a bottle of Glenfiddich exhumed from her late husband’s cocktail cabinet.

Occasionally, Lady Thatcher would rouse herself from her alcohol-befuddled reverie and stagger, tripping over the timeworn dorothy-bag that swung from her saggy-skinned wrist, uptown to a half-empty hall where other old ladies, in identical blue suits, sat on plastic chairs waving Union flags and clapping a bald little man standing up on a platform making incomprehensible speeches.

Once, Lady Thatcher, fortified by a generous imbibing of the Famous Grouse, managed to totter half-blind up to this stage to force her way to speak at the podium. Pushing the bald little orator aside, Lady Thatcher opened her cave of a mouth and intoned alternately a deathmarch monotone and the demented cackling of a burning witch; her wit, such as it was, comprised all the sagacity of an ageing pugilist at a post-fight press-conference:

"Blessed are the meek, for they have inherited my Party....rejoice!, rejoice!.....for where there is cash, then may there be questions, where there is darkness, may there be Michael Howard and where there are shares, may there be Jeffrey Archer....hic haec hoc....the lady’s not for spurning.....oh I do like to be beside the seaside....my old man said follow the van and don’t dilly-dally on the way...... have a banana......wibble..... have you seen yer mutha baby, standin’ in da shadow......."


Yet, midway through her vacuous ramblings on the state of Europe, Britain’s role in NATO and the glory of tobacco advertising, Lady Thatcher was seen to slump, face-down and completely passed-out on top of her makeshift pulpit, snoring stentoriously into the microphone to a ripple of applause, flag-waving and strains of Land of Hope and Glory.

(etc etc)

Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots
incline your face, your stretched-out mouth again
into the dreampool shoulder-hollow of
her shallow-rising body; now, begin
to coax new honey words, lent from above,
into the godland of a woman’s love