Orgreave: the battle of.

I live no more than three quarters of a mile from where the old Orgreave pit has now disappeared entirely from the landscape.

I was fascinated to see a letter on Teletext this week from a self-labelled 'soft southerner'.

It spoke of the miners' strike 25 years ago and referred to the negative role of the police.

I walked down to Orgreave during the clashes and did so to see for myself, from a distance, what was happening.

The police were magnificent: ordered, calm, restrained. The striking miners behaved appallingly badly.

How does history get so twisted, I ask? Well - so much of it is written by leftwingers whose grasp on both truth and reality can be rather slender.