Why I hated Margaret Thatcher

Every week there seemed to be an IRA terrorist attack or a transportation disaster - a devastating fire in a train station, the sinking of a pleasure boat in the Thames. Whatever the cause, as soon as the surviving victims were bandaged up and rendered presentable, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would show up at the hospital for a photo op. This filled Brits like me with a combination of rage and terror. Thus the Thatchcard: "In the event of an accident, the holder of this card wishes it to be known that he/she does not wish to be visited by Mrs. Thatcher in any circumstances whatsoever."

I know how churlish that may sound now. I carried around a ridiculous piece of plastic announcing that if one of the leaders of the free world took the time to visit my sickbed, I wished her turned away. In my defense, in that era Britain was suffused with such intense Thatcher-hatred that the enmity Obama truthers express for the president seems like a love affair by comparison.

I'd spent my elementary school years yelling "Thatcher, Thatcher, milk snatcher," because I was one of the kids deprived when, as education secretary, she abolished free school milk.

Until that policy went into effect, I'd spent every morning complaining bitterly about having to drink those odd little bottles of curdling room-temperature milk - at least that's how it was served in my school - but that didn't stop me from protesting the reform.

And from the time I was in high school until I left Britain not long after I graduated from university, a sure-fire way - usually the only way - to perk up a protest was to start the chant to which Britons of a certain age have a Pavlovian response: "Maggie, Maggie, Maggie!, Out, out, out!"

Check out Elvis Costello's performance of "Tramp the Dirt Down," a song in which he tells Thatcher: "I'd like to live/ Long enough to savor/ That when they finally put you in the ground/ I'll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down."

Why was Thatcher such a hated figure? Yes, it was about her policies - privatization, the selling off of public housing, her wars against Argentina in the Falklands and against the miners and the working class in Britain - but there was something else at work. On some level she was hated because she was a woman.

Between men who hated themselves for responding to Thatcher's stern, dominatrix-like scolding (watch "You turn if you want to; the lady's not for turning" and tell me you don't get chills) and women who wondered why our breakthrough female politician had to be a woman like her (though we surely knew that only an Iron Lady could have smashed the mold of British politics), the fact that Thatcher was female complicated things. Even her name was a hostage to ideology: Those on the left always used a condescending diminutive - Maggie Thatcher - while her devotees on the right used the honorific Mrs. Thatcher.

But in the typical British way, I have always believed that it was her slippery position in Britain's rigid class system that ramped up the levels of loathing. She grew up the daughter of a Midlands grocer in what the Guardian's Michael White called "the respectable working class."

Although she famously learned to speak in a posh accent as she climbed the political ladder, she grew up in a house without an indoor bathroom. Although throwing in her lot with the Conservative Party made her a traitor to her own class, the Tories apparently celebrated their colleague's upward mobility - they did, after all, make her their leader, even if she was never quite "one of them."

The Xperia ZL's plastic body might come off as a downgrade from the prettier Xperia Z, but the latter isn't available in Canada, so that makes the ZL the best Sony smartphone available. The 5-inch 1080p HD display is vibrant and crisp with a pixel density of 441, one of the best in the business. It's one flaw is that it loses its lustre when you start tilting the screen any which way.

That is a microcosm of the device, in many respects. It offers something that looks nice or works well, but loses points on the follow through. The screen's glass looks elegant, but is a real magnet for fingerprints and blemishes. There's a 2-megapixel front-facing camera capable of taking pretty good photos and video, but its odd placement at the bottom makes it easy to cover it accidentally. It's great that you can throw in a microSD card to expand on the 16GB of internal storage, but the flap to access the slot in the back feels very cheap.

But it's not all doom and gloom. Android 4.1.2 runs fluidly on the ZL, and Sony smartly refrained from cluttering up the home screens with stuff you don't need. Another smart move was making it possible to use small apps within other apps. Open any app, tap the multitasking button and they pop up at the bottom — a calculator, voice recorder, timer and notepad. Tap the + icon and you can download more from the Google Play store. A useful feature that actually saves time.

And then there's saving battery life. Sony has included something called "Stamina Mode" into the ZL, which is found under Power Management in the Settings. It disables mobile data when the screen is off, but you can exempt specific apps, like email, for example. Low Battery Mode kicks in at 30 percent charge left and turns off almost all settings to keep you going longer. It even tells you how much time is left.

There is an IR blaster on the phone that you can use to control your TV or almost anything else with an IR receiver. That even includes gas fireplaces that turn on or off with a remote, since the blaster can learn to control devices that aren't listed in the app.

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