‘That was fifteen years before I was born,’ Fridolin said with a shrug, and a sweet smile intended to exonerate him from Elgan’s accusation. ‘And she’s having all this,’ he added with a sweep of his arm from the Strand to Whitehall, just as the funeral cortege came into sight. ‘I don’t think Angela Merkel, our first woman Chancellor, will be honoured in this way.’

‘You’ll have to do an internet search on her when you get home… maybe you’ll get some sense of why she’s getting a ceremonial funeral with full military honours.’

They watched the procession turn into Trafalgar Square to muted applause, broken by a lone voice only yards from them shouting ‘Maggie, Maggie, burn in hell’. This anguished cry signalled a small group of onlookers to turn their backs as the hearse bearing her coffin passed by.

‘Why do people hate her so much?’ Fridolin asked.

‘There’s a nice café in the National Gallery,’ Elgan said, taking Fridolin by the arm and pointing to a building on the other side of the square. ‘Let’s move away in case it gets nasty here.’

They drank coffee and Fridolin ate two scones with strawberry jam and clotted cream. Being a man-of-a-certain-age, Elgan soon needed the toilet and excused himself. On his return, Fridolin was fingering his iPhone.

‘She was Prime Minister for a long time,’ he said, closing down the internet link and pocketing his phone. ‘And now I understand why one of the boys at Laban has been singing ‘Ding, dong! The witch is dead’ all week: he’s from the south Wales valleys and I overheard him say something about how his father and grandfather used to be coal miners.’

‘The miner’s strike lasted a year in ’84 to ’85 and destroyed many communities across the country. Family members fell out over it, and whole villages took opposing sides; some of those bad relationships were never repaired. Many people believe she killed the coal industry in Britain and left tens of thousands of people without a livelihood.’

‘But she won the war against Argentina, over those islands.’

‘She did, indeed… but for many people in Wales that was a terrible time.’

‘Were lots of Welsh soldiers killed?’

‘I’m sure people from Wales were injured and killed in the fighting,’ Elgan said, wondering how to simplify a complicated story. ‘But… in the nineteenth century a Welsh colony was established in Patagonia –.’

‘Really?’ Fridolin interrupted. ‘Why would people from Wales move to Argentina?’

‘For the same reasons lots of Germans went to North America in the nineteenth century; social and political, economic and religious… and the Welsh especially wanted to try to preserve their language; the English were doing their best to stamp it out at that time.’

‘So people in Wales saw Thatcher’s war against Argentina as being a war against some of their own descendants, is that what you’re saying?’