Funeral

I'm getting Princess-Diana-Funeral-Week flashbacks.  When Princess Diana died, we'd just come out of watching Conspiracy Theory, and we were sneaking a shortcut through Guildford Railway Station to get home.  There was a late edition of the Evening Standard on sale in the station WHSmiths saying Diana was dead.  For the next few weeks the country went mad.  All day, every day at work, the funeral was playing on the radio, every station was doing Diana tributes or teary interviews with people who'd once seen her from less than ten miles distance.

Now I'm hearing Ronald Reagan's funeral on the radio and trying not to scream.  I don't like funerals.  I don't like forced attendance by proxy over the radio, feeling depressed because it's a funeral and annoyed at enforced radio attendance and wanting to go somewhere sunny and read something upbeat and cheery like the Book Of The Dead to get it out of my mind.  I didn't really think about the man much when he was president.  I was a child, and too busy being told how wonderful Margaret Thatcher's Tory government was, how it was Much Worse under the previous Labour government, how we Left The Country because it was So Bad even the gravediggers and rubbish collectors were on strike.  We did leave the country, albeit briefly, spending eighteen months in New Zealand.

Postscript:

I ended up with loud depressing rock music on the headphones, typing too fast and too hard, grumpy for no good reason other than I put my favourite lip balm through the washer last night.  Knitting at lunchtime helped settle the nerves, working on my Fiona bag part time.  It's still shedding.

I have nothing against Ronald Reagan, I was a child for most of his time in office.  It bugs me to see people celebrating his death.  That's not right.  He was an old man and he died of Alzheimer's, a horrible disease.  Whatever your politics, no-one deserves that.  He probably did good, bad, smart, and stupid things during his presidency, just like the presidents before him and after him.  Let him rest in peace.  I'm not a Republican or a Democrat, I'm English, as in from England just in case that wasn't clear.  I'm tired of all the rhetoric and hysterics Reagan's death has produced.