In pictures: Thatcher - Liverpool's final farewell

 Pictures: Dave "The Pap" Evans

It's the little things that mark you out: the BBC big screen switched off by a Labour council - "A LABOUR COUNCIL", to recall Kinnock - for precisely the running time of the funeral. 

Then there was the Union flag flying, defiantly full, straining on the poles of civic buildings in 50 knot winds.

Among the death partygoers shuffled the young men in their uniform, but not that of the docker or the shipyard worker or the matchstick men at Lowry's factory gates

Winds that howled ever more balefully as the night wore on, wreaking havoc across towns in the north, just as the Iron Lady's policies had indisputedly done a generation ago. If you believed in the wrath of wicked witches, it was enough to make you think.

Earlier, as the state of Liverpool turned its back on what was a State occasion in everything but name, there was nothing on the quiet plodding streets of the city centre to mark the morning out from any other.

However, as those who still have jobs poured from workplaces, it was at St George's Plateau that they converged with the leathered and the weathered.

Several hundred people united to rejoice in conga lines with their "Thatcher is no longer" refrain, many too young to have enjoyed the moment when she really was no longer, deposed from power 23 years ago. Meanwhile, her twin-setted effigy burned undecorously, flames fanned by the whipping gales. There were few arrests.

Among the death partygoers shuffled the young men in their uniform - not that of the docker or the shipyard worker or matchstick men at Lowry's factory gates; instead, the snapback, the American Apparel hoodie and the North Face jacket. Likely these will never become the baseball players, American high school musical students nor the rock climbers that their attire suggests.

Instead, thanks to a first-world industrial base dismantled during 11 years of the PM's  rule - when the Finchley MP unflinchingly took her own baseball bat to the knees of unions, the baby sons of the redundant fathers may never know the heavy work and sense of place and purpose that thousands of years of evolution has built their physical frames and testosterone levels on.

That is the sadness of  the day that Margaret Thatcher died.