I KNOW, I know, it's one of those taboo subjects.
When someone shuffles off this mortal coil, the general consensus is not to talk or write about that person without sympathetic feelings, whether you liked them or not.
Throughout my life, to the best of my knowledge, I have adhered to that moral guideline.
Today, I'm making an exception.
She may have been approaching 90 years on this planet and has not delivered a speech from a position of power since the late autumn of 1990.
But Margaret Hilda Roberts - or as we all knew her in those appalling times for this country, Maggie Thatcher - is no more.
And I, for one, am celebrating her passing today.
It's not for some sick, perverted reason that I am happy she is no longer with us.
I am simply thinking of the way she masterminded the destruction of this country in the 1980s wrecking families' lives across the length and breadth of the United Kingdom - indeed, creating a disunited kingdom.
From the shipyards on our coasts to the car plants in our big cities to our steelworks and mining communities, her policies condemned millions and millions of people, transforming their lives for the worst.
I was still in my final year at St Gregory's Junior School in Lydiate when she first entered Downing Street in May, 1979.
By the time she had departed in November, 1990, I had completed my years in high school, my degree and was a couple of months into my post-graduate journalism course in Preston.
So, in many ways, my knowledge of politics - left, right, and those irksome fence-sitters, developed over the years she was in office.
There was something about her I could never take to - her hideous, manipulated voice for a start - that forever sounded as if she was talking down to you - which, of course, she was.
And when I later saw that often-repeated footage of her delivering some of those words of St Francis of Assisi on the steps of Number 10 on that first day she became Prime Minister, it made my blood curdle. How she ever had the gall to use some of his wonderful prayer was beyond me.
Mind you, she didn't care who she pissed off - getting her own way was everything to her and the more enemies she made - and she made more than a ton - the more determined she seemed to become.
Even within her own Cabinet she made enemies - anyone remember Michael Heseltine and the infamous Westland affair for a start?
As with all Tories, it's foreign policy - and in particular the question of Europe - that did for her politically in the end.
Geoffrey Howe's famous speech in the Commons during that unforgettable November undid the ropes that were holding the bells back and within days the death knell was clanging and she was gone, driven with tears in her eyes out of Downing Street.
It was a joyful time for all left-leaning people like me and I can still recall to this day the celebratory party in Preston's Old Black Bull pub where the Boddington's flowed freely as we celebrated her political departure.
Today, it's been her final departure from this life and I'm certainly not going to apologise for raising a glass of red wine this evening to mark that.
For destroying the lives of countless millions of people in this country - and, as Crass sang, for the being the mother of a thousand dead in the Falklands - I'd be very happy to be joining those people lining up to tramp the dirt down on her grave (in the words of Elvis Costello's great song).
The problem is, I think I'd be ready to be drawing my old age pension by the time I'd got to the front of the queue... Mind you, I think it would be worth it.
