Sunday a.m. rest of the world still waking; Crown Point in throes of litter and glitter i.e. the morning meets the night before (casualties and such). The woman who runs the launderette is still celebrating Burnley's win over Chelsea and getting teary nostalgia trips for her childhood in Sutton when she would watch the local team playing from her bedrooom window, a steaming cup of Lemsip on the sill - in those days she did not want to become a launderette maid, spending her time completing service washes and reclining on aching insteps, charged with Nescafe, but then she fell pregnant and that was it, life had been consigned - for a while all was ripeness and glow (but then maybe that's the way of it) and she retreats into those memories with more frequency now she's looking at the looming edge of Fifty -

out in the street, picking up my feet over lumps of sticky mud dispersed from god only knows where (cats, dogs, frogs fall from space - so why not hunks o' mud?) I am gripped in the hand by an overly friendly, crusty-skinned black guy who is beaming whilst he downs a can of cheap strong cider - he's not wasted (not yet) - and shakes it like I'm his long lost brother. Looks me straight in the eye and fixes the gaze there for the extent of the conversation:

'Margaret Thatcher is still alive,' he says without giving away how he feels about this. The ex-premier had been released from hospital after being taken ill overnight and her prim figure was displayed on many of the front pages of the Sundays.

I nod without speaking - I'm not sure I want to get into a street chat; the hawk in me is flighty after all.

'She's not dead yet,' he carries on, this time shaking his head.

I laugh at the caustic admission, the underlying hope that he is pressing at. Seeking to find in me.

'Not yet.' I give that much. A concession.

He is determined to draw me out - his gaze, almost hypnotic and his affable smile.

'Tell me, come on, wha' do you think of her? You're a serious man, I can tell.'

I tell him. It pours out. Can't help myself:

the rancour
the disappointment
the anger
the sorrow

the feelings of many that recall her premiership - nothing new in this - (lucky ones to have survived, christ knows there were enough casualties)

dark days of battle and confrontation (plural) -

of the dismantling of social cohesion and respect - of the great, plague pall of destruction that is her legacy

This stranger takes my hand once again and at the top of his voice says:

'Man, you must put words down - I bet you do - your voice is strong; you got to be a writer or a crit, eh? C'mon what are you?'

I feel embarrassed and at the same time enthralled by my own words, by the emotional resonance of what I expressed on the hoof

'No. I'm just someone who regrets what she did and what's happened since. The ironing out of political difference and nuance, the aneasthetising of self-expression and radicalism, of protest. These politicians are all the same and it's because of her. She took the strength out of our nation. That's why no-one wants to vote any more.'

'Enoch Powell,' he says then, out of the blue. Leaning toward me as if we have become conspirators and supping from his cider can which was secreted about his person somewhere.

Then he gets to his point, the thing that's been begging at the door of his anger

'And what about the brothers who say there are too many immigrants ruining this country?' He indicates the row of shops nearby. 'I hear them saying these things.'

'Brothers? What brothers?'

'The brothers there . . . who, you know, have these places.'

He's referring to the Asians that run the newsagents and mini-marts.

'I don't have an answer. All I can tell you is this: when I was growing up anyone of any colour was pretty much fighting a common cause: to gain respect and equality within society. It came close at a street level. But, Thatcher did her best to make a mess of that. That's why people are divided now - she made sure we all became afraid of each other. That's what I mean by her destruction of social cohesion. What nobody can understand is that underneath we are all migrants: everyone comes and every goes.'

I'm sure we could have talked for hours, him getting progressively worse for booze - who knows - but my bus arrived and we shook hands and parted company.

I felt proud of something I could not identify. Myself, perhaps.

On the way home I noticed a garden full of statues of the Buddha -

I thought about that