This all took place before our eyes on TV and ‘we’ won! Unfortunately, on the back of this drummed up jingoism, Thatcher also won the election and had a mandate to continue her master-plan to foment narcissistic greed and to abolish society as we knew it. All in all: Be insanely selfish! It's the only way to put the Great back into Britain!
And she succeeded.
So I checked out of the Hotel Ayamitre where male receptionists of Falklands fighting age had dealt brusquely with me, except for a chirpy younger one who told me to just open the window if I wanted to smoke in his non-smoking hotel, and a taxi took me to the ferry terminal for a one hour crossing of the River Plate estuary onto the Uruguayan town of Colonia de Sacramento.
As we crossed the silty river mouth, the sun broke out and beamed down, and it was a five minute walk up from the port to the peace of the Hotel Romio where I lay my bag on a wooden floor in a renovated villa, sunbeams slanting through wooden slats on the windows.
After a chicken and chips lunch (superb) I wandered down to the still active Catholic Mission with nuns walking about and scored a lump of very dark green, semi-solid Paraguayan weed from some sort of half-pissed rastafarian bloke selling handicrafts, then rolled one up on a grassy knoll by the sea and settled into a town described to me by a local yokel as ‘tranquilo’.
Man, is he right.