SO, WHAT EXACTLY HAVE I GOT AGAINST GRANTHAM? WELL, I SAY, SURRENDER UNTO GRANTHAM THAT WHICH IS GRANTHAM'S.

This country! I can't take no more. I have found that everything from the supposedly simple task of putting my bin out for emptying to complex exercises such as phoning a former public utility to query a "power invoice" of £2.457 million for the quarter leaves me deeply irritated and with the desire to punch someone involved hard!
Punching, and for that matter kicking, stabbing, garrotting and shooting, are all illegal, as I understand it, and so what is one to do? I have thought long and hard about this frustrating fact of life and have come to the conclusion that I have to take out my angst at all the shit which I come across on a daily basis on just one target - I have chosen the town of Grantham.
I intend to export to Grantham everything which I find appalling from the moment I wake in the morning until that blessed moment when I fall unconscious at night. I will note each irritation down and build a list of "Grantham must haves" with a view to creating a new town, one which its most famous child can be held directly accountable for and which will illustrate in microcosm what has become of Grate (sic) Britain over the last 30 years.
Why Grantham? Let me explain.

A History Lesson.
On October 13, 1925, a baby girl was spawned in the picturesque, little town of Grantham in Lincolnshire, England. This seemingly harmless tot would go on, in her supposedly adult years, to cast a shadow over the United Kingdom and throw a large part of the world into darkness as well. Her name? Margaret Hilda Roberts.
At the height of her powers this woman would famously declare "the lady's not for turning" but Miss Roberts was a long way from that mindless soundbite when she changed her name to Thatcher, for marital purposes, and, in the first of a litany of cuts she was to oversee, had her Christian name shortened to Maggie. Later still, when her reign of error was over, she would be renamed yet again - this time her monica was to be Baroness Thatcher.
Mrs T - yet another of her pseudonyms as the cuts really began to bite - first entered the House of Commons in 1959 as the Conservative MP for Finchley, was elected Tory leader in 1975 and then four years later became the nation's first, and as a result probably last, woman Prime Minister.
She began a career of desecration and destruction in the top job, unrivalled since Mr G Khan by-passed the electoral process in the late 12th Century to spread his unique brand of Conservatism across most of the then known world.
Maggie's grip on power lasted for an unbelievable 11 years and 209 days - try to find someone today who said they voted for her! - until she was metaphorically stabbed in the back by her underlings but, whereas Mr Khan took more than 40 years to royally bollocks everything up for his contemporaries, she had managed to wreak her own brand of havoc in a quarter of that time.

A Lesson from History.
"My name is legion, for we are many." The Biblical quote could well apply to those of us who believe that Thatcher was behind the dismantling, destruction and desecration of so much that was precious, morally sound and beautiful and the introduction of so much that is ugly, mindless and just plain irritating.
* The miners - All-but gone. Terrorised by The Met, almost starved. Crushed! Yet everything their admittedly barmy Brillo Pad-hairdo leader predicted about mass pit closures, political motivation and not-so-cheap imports was correct.
* Union power - "The unions are too powerful!" they screamed. Maybe so in the '70s but was it really good to usher in a new world where you look from union boss to "management executive" and can't tell the difference, a la Animal Farm? Is a sound democracy where you have to have a full retina scan and a rectal scrape before being allowed to even to consider calling industrial action? Do we really want kids to think unions are groups of pinko-Stalinist-hippies and for our yoof to continually belch "there's nuffink in the union for me so why bovver"?
* Rabid privatisation - the shambolic railways service, water companies which have run out of water, school meals services which have produced our chip and blue pop-obsessed future citizens, prisoner transport firms whose unifying motto seems to be "better out than in", police cars sponsored by Lillets, buses which you now expect to be driven by Terry Thomas with a mob of St Trinian's girls on board. The list goes on - so much bile, so little space.
* Deregulation in the media - I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here? How about "I'm a Viewer, Fuck Off!"?
* The market economy - Told you it wouldn't work in the health service, but would you listen?
* Wider share ownership - Yeah, right! So everyone who has a job leaving them with disposable cash (that's millions out of it for a start) runs out to buy their 100 NaziElectricity Inc shares and then sells them the following day to make £18 profit. They sell them unwittingly to major insurance firms and global companies who now own what we ALL used to own. A further reward? Sod anyone who works for a company or the poor buggers who use its services - it's shareholders who count, no-one else.
* "There's no such thing as society." - Fuck off!
* "We are a grandmother." - I told you, fuck off!!

The Problem.
I could go on but the plate in my head starts to shift at times like these and so I have to withdraw and think happy thoughts - like a nuclear attack on Noel Edmonds.
The point of this rant is who do we have to blame for all this? The Thatch woman will go the way of all flesh eventually (assuming she is not, in fact, an alien lifeform which has discovered the secret of immortality) and so there's too much to dish out in too short a time. Her parents are no doubt culpable but the same problem is involved. Then it came to me. Grantham! Grantham hosted her birth and so is partly responsible for all the crap which we have now been saddled with (can you be saddled with crap?) so isn't it time we gave something back?

The Penultimate Solution.
I want to give Grantham a new lease of life and give it as much as it has given the rest of us. It could be a service, a person, an attitude, a moral code, a politician, a television programme, a celebrity, a twin town, a business, a Government initiative, a council policy.....the list is, I fear, endless.
One doesn't have to search high and low for candidates to be "Granthamed". They metaphorically shove their arses in your face every day and so I shall blog their indecent exposures. Hopefully, a new Grantham will emerge as time goes by, a Grantham the Thatch Creature would no doubt delight in. If, on the other hand, she would find it unbearable, ugly, awful, cheap, irritating, debasing and futile, so much the better. The nation has been lumbered with it all for too long. It's time to give, give, give. Render unto Grantham that which is Grantham's!