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“Baldrick,” Lord Blackadder famously lamented, “the path of my life is strewn about with cowpats from the devil’s own satanic herd…”

Characters like Blackadder were loved because they so beautifully captured the frustrations we all feel as we negotiate the devil’s cowpats littering our path.

I forgot my youngest’s daily dose of asthma prevention this morning. This morning was a time of great sorrow at Fraser Towers: the first day of a new term. Thus, there was an atmosphere of gloom similar to that which must prevail in the home of Michael Gove when the family hears his key in the door. Beset by misery, I forgot Tom’s puffer.

So I came home to collect it and deliver it to school for administration to the boy. I placed it and the dog in the car and set off, blissfully unaware of the cowpats in the road.

For some reason the dog chose this morning to bark uncontrollably from the back, rendering useless my plan of listening to the birthday CD of the BBC recording of The Odyssey sent me by Brother Grandpa. Odysseus faced a few monsters, but the lucky bugger never had to deal with a mad barking collie. Mind you, he got home faster than me….

I dropped the puffer at school, and set off for the woods. Behind a vintage tractor proceeding at 2mph. It turned off. I went on at an even slower pace behind a succession of horses. I sighed.

Some of these riders I knew, and thus I knew they were aiming their expensive, pointless creatures on a pointless ride in the direction of my dog walk: this would enrage the mad collie further, and cause whinging from those pointlessly sitting on the pointless nags. So I sighed and changed direction.

The vintage tractor (a Ferguson, I think) had also changed direction, and I found myself behind it once more. I sighed. The mad collie does not like tractor engines (or lorry engines or horses or people or talking or music or buses or cars or vans or bicycles or pretty much anything, really, apart from me) and so it began to bark uncontrollably once more.

I passed the tractor. More pointless horses. I passed the pointless horses, to find myself behind the Brother Who Must Not Be Named, in his work truck, proceeding at a pace that made the vintage tractor look like Sebastian Vettel’s racing car. He was clearly on an hourly rate. I sighed.

Many days after I left, I returned home. The washing had nearly dried on the line and this caused me to smile for the first time today. In the brief moment in which, smiling, I put some coffee on, a single, solitary cloud adrift in a sky of blue dropped its content of moisture on my washing line and, seemingly, nowhere else.

I sighed. For a break, I ventured off to check on the pointless horses that pointlessly inhabit my field. The cloud had not just dropped its load upon the line: it had also dropped sufficient water on the field entrance to cause me to fall flat on my fat arse in the mud and horse poo. I sighed once more.

I changed my clothes and went to wring out the washing. Returning, Brother Bertie’s cat, now referred to as Captain Pusstasticus by the children and as You Bastard by me, ambushed me from an acer tree, leaping onto my shoulders and digging in its wed muddy paws. Joining in what appeared to be a jolly game, the mad collie reared up and placed its own muddy paws upon my chest.  I sighed.

I changed, poured a coffee and turned on Radio 4 for the 1pm news. “Plans for the funeral of Lady Thatcher….” I sighed.

Certainly the news has been strewn about with cowpats from the devil’s own satanic herd this week, though overall I’ve been impressed by the balance of the coverage of Thatcher’s death. Her fans have had plenty of opportunities to sing her praises, but the divisions and difficulties she caused have not been airbrushed out of her life story as the right would wish.

However, the right-wing press, of course, has been enraged by anybody who dared raise a voice of criticism. Presumably, when Arthur Scargill dies they’ll report the event with the fairness and sympathy they feel is being denied their heroine.

A press that whines like a jet engine if a poor person so much as claims a week’s dole money is purring with ecstasy at the thought of Thatcher’s £10 million funeral, to be attended by intellectual giants of our age such as Jeremy Clarkson and by her close friends and family.

Like the children who abandoned her to her lonely fate in a hotel, for Christ’s sake, and the politicians – Lord Heseltine, Kenneth Clarke and many more – who queued up to stab her in the back when they felt she was no longer any use to them.

It’s going to be attended by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, for the love of God. The one thing you can say for the wretched Thatcher is she never abandoned her foul principles; those two sell what’s left of their birthright and principles every single day, and do it again on Wednesday. Disgusting.

I think most of all it’s the stupidity and banality of the situation that’s angered me this week: Thatcher’s success was built on ancient and fairly stupid clichés – greed, selfishness, hatred of foreigners – and the reflections on her passing have proved we haven’t really advanced very far.

For example, we have been asked to accept that the only way to change a Britain riven by industrial strife was to side with the state against working people, and smash them utterly. Nobody has had the wit to point out that other countries found other ways of negotiating their way out of civil unrest, with much greater success than our fractured nation.

It’s summed up in the person I met who told me how awful his job was: he had to work until 8 or 9 at night to manage his workload, there weren’t enough staff to handle the work, his pay was miserable, he was terrified of complaining because he’d lose his job; when I asked if he belonged to a trade union he curled his lip and said how wonderful Maggie had been to break the power of the unions. He genuinely did not understand what he was saying.

And that’s the level of cliché applied to her. To listen to the news you’d think she’d single-handedly lifted the iron curtain and ended the cold war, or at least done so with the aid of old Hopalong Reagan. Of the existence of the brave people of Eastern Europe – Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Jan Dubcek – not a single mention. Of the thousands who protested and marched and risked their lives for liberty from dictatorship – dictatorship, not socialism – not one word. Of the Germans who risked all, economically and socially, to reunite their nation and through consensus and fairness, with the help of the trade unions, made a roaring success of the enterprise, not one single word.

I suppose, at the end of the day, a debate that cannot move beyond banality, cliché, lie and confusion, that tolerates no dissenting voice, is just about right for Lady Thatcher.

Sister Wizard Woman will be joining Captain Kay and myself as we smuggle ourselves past the security guards to visit Lady Thatcher’s grave – she has her own dark errand she wishes to perform, one which will require the old Captain and I to avert our eyes, I fear. The good Sister is fond of the last word, of course, and so I leave you this week to your mourning with this offering from her.