Category Archives: Royals

April 27, 2021 · 11:11 am

What princes can learn from frogs

The last time I wrote on this subject I was called bitchy by someone I like and admire so I’m treading carefully today. I’m referring to the current soap opera that I follow with fascination – no, not the busty beautiful Armenian family who seem to rivet the States, but a family nearer home (mine!)

The arguments for a republic versus a monarchy are not my domain, but in passing I’d say: do the third of the world’s population who belong to the Commonwealth and accept Elizabeth Windsor as their Queen, really want to swap this benign system for one in which their country is both ruled and represented by a Macron or a Sarkosy, or going further afield, a Berlusconi or a Putin? (I’m sticking resolutely to Europe for these comparisons rather than looking across the Atlantic to another controversial power situation.)


A minor point would be the sheer expense of changing all the millions of letterheads and signs, from the Royal Mail, to Her Majesty’s forces, even to a commission to serve in the army – I still treasure the wording on mine: “To my trusty and well-beloved”..
So I dip my toe very cautiously into the waters of controversy that I’m probably about to stir up as fiercely as they’ve already been muddied. I have both questions which will never be answered, and thoughts which may well be labelled bitchy again!
The world-wide airing of family linen by a woke American TV hostess provoked many of these thoughts, one of which was why didn’t the aggrieved pair who did the shaming and blaming to the whole world, just talk it over with their family?


It’s fascinating to analyse many of the extraordinary statements made, so many of which turned out to be untrue. The first of which was the smiling bombshell dropped, that the happy couple had had a private and secret ceremony three days before their wedding – that splendid ceremonial ritual for which the Royal family and the British taxpayer paid millions.

It felt as though Harry’s wife was implying that the spectacle was just for the peasants, but the real thing was their private ceremony, saying they “called up the Archbishop”, conjuring up a picture of the Primate of all England picking up his cassock and scurrying over to their garden for this touching little ceremony. ‘We have the certificate framed and hung on our wall’, she informed her gullible interviewer.

Well, I’d like to see a picture of this  document in its frame, hanging on a wall in California. The Archbishop, interviewed in an Italian magazine, has said that to have conducted such a misleading ceremony without all the required provisos of witnesses,  certificates, and legal processes would be “to have committed a serious criminal offence”.
So we can all breathe easy, the wedding which millions of people watched with such hope in their hearts Was the real thing, not the sham that Harry’s wife was suggesting. So we were not hood-winked after all. But why did she want to hoodwink us? Did she want us to feel she was too grand to share her vows with the public and family who were paying for it?

Then there was the brushing away of the question from Oprah that perhaps the new arrival had been welcomed into the family, showing a picture of Catherine and her sister taking Meghan to Wimbledon. ‘Things aren’t always how they look’, said Meghan evasively. No wonder she was evasive. That picture had been taken the day after Meghan had turfed forty tennis lovers out of the seats they had paid for, so she could sit with two friends in grand and conspicuous splendour uncontaminated by the great unwashed. She had sent her security men to forbid two other tennis fans from taking pics of her, the only problem being that one, a former Wimbledon player, was taking a selfie with Roger Federer, as was the elderly immigrant of many years attendance at the matches.


The next day, Catherine mounted a rescue operation to try to save Meghan’s face. She roped her sister Pippa in, to make it look like a casual girls afternoon  together, and they sat among the crowd, Catherine and her sister observing the Wimbledon requirements to dress up, while Meghan just wore a casual shirt and skirt.

Similarly at their very last engagement in the UK, the Commonwealth Service at Westminster Abbey, when everyone is asked to wear red, white or blue, Harry’s wife ignored the convention, and wore the Kermit green outfit which has since become such a talking point. And strangely all through the service, where the camera focused on the faces of the Royal family listening solemnly and sombrely to the sermon and the service, Meghan is smiling brightly and inappropriately all the way through… why, I wonder?

There hasn’t been much attention paid to one of the reasons Meghan was accused of bullying, but I find it fascinating. Apparently when Harry had a shooting party at Sandringham for his friends, Meghan had ordered red blankets for each of the guests. The staff got the wrong red, according to statements made about bullying. But why Was Meghan doling out red blankets? Was there not enough bedding in the bedrooms at Sandringham where generations of Royal family had slept? Or did she feel that the decor was so fusty or whatever, that she’d improve it with red blankets?  Either way it was a subtle criticism of the Queen’s home, and  disrespect for the generous grandmother who had lent it to her grandson.


And talking of Sandringham, one of the public criticisms of the “family Meghan had never had” in Harry’s words, was that the couple felt  unwelcomed. Yet they turned down invitations to spend Christmas at Sandringham with the whole family, and refused to go to Balmoral for the traditional summer holiday with everyone in the family. Instead, Meghan flew to New York for the weekend to watch her friend Serena play tennis.

The Queen bent every rule she had applied to other engaged members of the family and included Meghan and her mother at traditional family gatherings, including the big Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace for cousins and more distant family members. The public airing of so many petty grievances, imaginary slights, exaggerated claims and outright untruths was a strange decision for a couple who had said they were leaving their duties and their family in order to enjoy privacy in California.

These and many other thoughts filter through my mind as I watch the soap opera which continues to play out. The dignity and sadness of Prince Phillip’s passing is once again being muddied by Sussex decisions – the day after he returned to the US, Harry driving ninety two miles to lunch with an elderly Californian billionaire on his just bereaved grandmother’s birthday, and the re-issuing of the infamous tell- all ‘Finding Freedom’, which will now include the Oprah Winfrey accusations, and all the angst and arrows directed at the Royal family and the British public with which the alienated pair have so freely wounded them.

In a recent blog I used the headline ‘Truth Matters’, and to see how destructive it has been to watch two people give ‘their truth’ in order to have revenge ( what for) or to justify walking away from commitments and responsibilities has been deeply saddening.  The self-serving attempts by privileged adults to undermine the reputations of well meaning people, trying to trash and dis-respect an ancient institution, and bad mouthing a whole country and it’s customs are neither kind, nor compassionate or any of the things this woke couple keep preaching about.

Such ingratitude was all the more surprising from a couple who had enjoyed privileges, palaces, and private jets, couture clothes and continual luxury holidays, while the people they patronisingly lectured about saving the planet, got on with the daily drudgery of earning just enough money to survive. Meghan complained that she was only surviving but not flourishing – yet this is the fate of many others too.

In fact, Prince Harry and his wife are a constant reminder to me how imperfect I am as a human being because they evoke in me such enjoyment of schadenfreude. As so many people have commented, it’s like watching a train crash, but sadly as in any train crash, there’s a lot of damage. Maybe the lesson the terrible two are teaching me is the necessity of integrity, and the value of non-judgement.

And as Marcus Aurelius said nearly two thousand years ago: “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own – not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine…”

While the pain of Harry and Meghan’s attacks on family and country was unfolding, his ninety-nine year old grandfather died. The world has learned from all his eulogies what a magnificent life he lived, full of good deeds, duty, and devotion to his wife, family and country.

I wrote to a friend in the US:
“Have been feeling rather sad today about the death of Prince Philip, a much maligned man, especially in the nefarious and destructive Netflix episodes. He was a fine man, and I was fascinated to learn that among the two thousand books in his own library, were 650 books on birds, an amazing five hundred on religion, several hundred on horses, and over two hundred poetry books. He was also a talented painter, an interesting, clever and kindly man, very good to Diana, much underrated and un-appreciated… married to the Queen for 73 years, and loyal and faithful, in spite of all the untrue nasty gossip hawked around by Netflix et al. RIP”


And I shared a moment which was so typical of him… my daughter’s godmother, who in her retirement was a guide at St George’s Windsor, had sent my daughter a silver chain and pilgrim medallion struck to mark some historic anniversary.  She wore it to receive her Duke of Edinburgh Gold Medal from Prince Philip at Government House in Wellington. He immediately noticed her chain and talked to her about it, having recognised it was a St George’s souvenir… how many men, in all that crowd, would have noticed and recognised what one of the teenagers was wearing?

duke.jpg
duke.jpgThe photo of the Duke which I placed here,, of the Duke examining the medallion keeps disappearing on reader’s blogs… no doubt I will understand the arcane ways of WordPress one day.

I met him at a function on their Jubilee tour, he was a gorgeous man, and so relaxed and friendly. I told him I worked from home, and he agreed that it was a great system, saying he too worked above the shop!!!


And I loved this story from my oldest friend, from when we were both twenty. She wrote to me:
“I must admit to quite a few tears, it is so sad, he was an amazing man, now at last the public will find out his true  value.My father took a polo team to Windsor one year, calling themselves ‘Low arrow cottage!’ They were four middle aged men who loved their hunting and their horses and enjoyed their polo, although not that good! They joined the tournament, and  one of their number got injured, Prince Philip strolled over to my father and said , “I see you are a man down, would you like me to play for you?” Which he did, until they got knocked out, how kind  was that !”

You see, Harry and Meghan, as Kermit the Frog once said, “It’s nice to be important but it’s important to be nice.”

Food for Threadbare Gourmets


What no recipe, several readers queried after my last blog! That was some time ago, as my computer collapsed, taking everything with it, and I’m still gathering the lost chords, including my blog, addresses, and all the other blogs I used to read…
However, I have still been eating, and here is a dish I gave to my vegan granddaughter, which I also enjoy.
Take a cup or so of green puys lentils, pour two cups of vegetable stock over them ( I use chicken stock if I’m cooking these for myself ) and start them boiling. Meanwhile, in a tablespoon of good olive oil, saute half an onion, a carrot and a courgette, chopped very small, and add two bay leaves, garlic and thyme to taste. Tip them into the lentils, add some tomato puree or a dollop of soya sauce, and cook till the lentils are soft but not mushy, adding more liquid if necessary. I serve these with salmon, or grilled sausages, and even enjoy them on their own, with a sprinkling of extra olive oil on top… almost calorie -free good protein …

Food for Thought

Life isn’t a matter of milestones, but of moments. Rose Kennedy

Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country. Rose’s son

Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future. Him again.


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Filed under cookery/recipes, kate and pippa middleton, Queen Elizabeth, Royals, Uncategorized

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March 14, 2020 · 12:28 pm

Dynasties, duties and decisions
liz
The Queen on her way to open her first Parliament  in 1952
When I worked on a magazine, in an idle moment I picked up a tome lying around. It was a biography of Queen Mary, this Queen’s grandmother, and written by James Pope Hennessy, who the Royal family considered a ‘safe pair of hands.’ So he had access to all the Windsor archives. (sadly, being a safe pair of hands wasn’t enough to stop him being murdered by his gay lover a few years later)

The book became an obsession, filled with trivial delicious gossip and detail as well as history, and ending with flimsy folded pages of yard long pull-out family trees of all the British and European monarchies, their marriages and inter-marriages, offspring, ancestors… and genealogy became another hobby.

A friend gave me my own copy of the book, and I followed it up with the acquisition of biographies of everyone else, from Queen Victoria and her numerous offspring, who became Queens, Grand Duchesses and Empresses of duchies, kingdoms and empires all over Europe. I gobbled up the histories of her successors, the Edwards, the George’s, Alexandra, Elizabeth’s, and so on.

I devoured Victoria’s letters to her daughter, the Princess Royal who became Empress of Germany, who with her tragic husband  battled Bismarck  and then Bismarck’s pupil, her son, the notorious Kaiser Wilhelm; Victoria’s letters to her second daughter Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse-Darmstadt, and the disaster of both haemophilia and diphtheria which claimed her family. And Alice’s six-year-old son saying why can’t we all go together, as another sibling died. And the eerie events that followed, when his sister Tsarina Alexandra and all her family died together in the cellar at Ekaterinburg, and he, by now, Grand Duke, dying in an air crash with all his family, wife, children, mother in law, on their way to a wedding in England, and finally Mountbatten, Alice’s grandson, dying with members of his family and others in the IRA atrocity in Ireland.

I learned about Edward the Seventh’s  affairs, including his longest and deepest commitment to Mrs Keppel, the present Duchess of Cornwall’s great grandmother, the anorexia and vanity of ravishingly beautiful Empress Elizabeth of Austria who used to wear damp skin-tight leather riding habits to accentuate her figure, and was assassinated by an anarchist as she walked to a  ferry in Geneva; poor George who became King when his brother abdicated, in agony for much of his childhood from splints to correct knock knees, and the physical strictures he suffered from having to stop being left handed – no wonder he stammered as an adult.

I absorbed Sir Charles Petrie’s acute psychological analysis of the ruling house of Britain when he described the brutal Cumberland streak,  a reference to Queen Victoria’s sadistic uncle; the conscientious Coburg inheritance, from noble Prince Albert, whose last action as he was dying of typhoid was to avert war between the US and Britain in 1861, a war which could have changed the course of history; and the artistic, self-indulgent, party-loving, charming Hanoverian streak inherited from the Prince Regent who was known as Prince Charming back in the 1840’s, and personified more recently by Princess Margaret. These personality types are still obvious to this day in each generation of the Royals.

So when a publisher commissioned me to write a book on the Royal’s relationship with NZ, I had already primed the pump, as it were. One of the fascinating aspects of following such a well -documented family is to see how heredity plays its part in each generation – including William’s conscientious Coburg nature, like his grandmother the Queen’s, to Harry’s red Spencer hair, a legacy of Sarah, first Duchess of Marlborough three hundred years ago. She had a mane of glorious red hair which in one of her famous rages, she chopped off to spite her devoted husband, John. After this great Duke of Marlborough died, she found a box with her hair in it, lovingly preserved by her husband. That red hair has descended through every generation of the Spencer – Churchill family including to Winston Churchill and Princess Diana’s brothers and sisters.

So when Prince Harry married his American bride with her exotic heritage, like everyone else I was fascinated and intrigued for all the many reasons commenters and pundits have expounded. And fascinated too, by the enthusiasm with which the British people took the newcomer to their hearts – great crowds wherever the couple went, huge mobs of thrilled and enthusiastic spectators at their lavish wedding and the excitement when a new baby was announced ( though somewhat mixed, since the announcement seemed timed to overshadow the Queen’s grand daughter’s wedding)

Since then as everyone knows, the fairy story has dissolved in the light of common day, diverse personalities and controversial decisions. As the opposing sides have argued, Royal Family fans versus the Sussex’s, I’ve been saddened by the distortions of truth, which have ended up tarnishing the Queen and Catherine, William’s blameless wife.

For example, the defenders of Meghan’s decision not to bring Archie, the Queen’s great grandson, to see his family, argued that the Queen left her two eldest toddlers for six months. She did. But she left them with their doting grandmother, the Queen Mother, and their aunt Princess Margaret.

She had no choice. When she took up the tour of the Commonwealth to thank each country for their support during WW2, which George VI had been unable to do because of ill health, it was aborted in Kenya on the death of her father. The following year she tried again and during my research for the book I’d been commissioned to write, I found they stayed nearly every night at a different town and new hotel all over the world.

Even when they wearily got to their destination each night in this country, choirs came and serenaded them outside, every evening, so they had to go out and thank them before collapsing inside. No point in dragging their toddlers from one strange place to another every day. By contrast, when Charles and Diana brought William, he learned to crawl on the lawn of Government House in Auckland where they were able to make their base.

Others pointed to Catherine leaving her children for a week’s second honeymoon, but again they were with their doting grand- parents, not just a friend of their mother’s. Which is one of the odd things about Arche’s situation, that his grandmother, his only other family member, doesn’t do what most devoted grand-parents do, and take the opportunity to be with him when his parents aren’t. Though Meghan says she’s done the right thing as she wants her son to grow up in a loving fun-filled environment, he’s actually been wrenched away from his wider family, with a clutch of happy fun-filled young cousins, family summer holidays at Balmoral and Christmases at Sandringham.

The worst thing of all, to me, is the way both the Royal Family and the UK have been vilified in order to justify what many people feel is a dereliction of duty. To call the family ‘toxic’, and the country ‘racist’ is not just untrue but deeply hurtful to everyone involved. To those who call England racist I can only point to the front bench of the present government. The three great offices of state in Britain are the First Lord of the Treasury, the Prime Minister’s formal title, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Home Secretary. The last two offices are held at this moment by the sons and daughters of Pakistani and Ugandan immigrants. The Lord Mayor of London is the son of Muslim Pakistani immigrants. Similarly, the Labour party is well stocked with WOC and even Men of Colour both from the West Indies and other parts of the world!

Sadly these accusations are repeated by some vocal and disaffected men and women of colour and others, both in England, and on American television and in their media, blackening England’s name and reputation as a kind and tolerant society, which it always has been, which is why so many refugees have made their way to it over the centuries.

It was in England that Lord Chief Justice Lord Mansfield, made the first great declaration on freedom and slavery, when he decreed in 1772 that the slave Somersett, who had escaped his American master, should be free, and that any slave who set foot on English soil automatically became free. Slavery, he said, was odious and had no basis in English common law. It was finally abolished in 1834 throughout the much-maligned British Empire, and the Royal Navy patrolled the seas for sixty years with a special anti-slavery squadron to stamp out slave trafficking by other nations. It cost some thousands of sailor’s lives, as well as money.

George Orwell wrote in 1940 that ‘England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box.‘

Sadly the huge rent in the fabric of the Royal family with the defection of two senior members, is being reflected in the country as a whole; in a split between the voices of common sense and tradition, and the voices of woke, liberal elites – the ones George Orwell was describing eighty years ago. The voices of common sense and tradition were those which rejected ‘isms and ideologies of the ‘woke’ factions in the recent election.

And these decent hardworking people are for the most part, patriotic – anathema to liberal elites. Yet as Orwell explained: ‘By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.’

The people who cheered on Meghan and Harry at their wedding, were patriots, and they welcomed the introduction of a lively new foreign addition to their ranks. Yet now those same decent people of England with their proud history of tolerance, and of opposition  to racism/slavery when it was still accepted elsewhere, are having to live with the label of racism pinned on them by their own much-loved Prince Harry and his wife of less than two years.

And the Royal family who welcomed that wife are having to live with the label she gave them of being ‘toxic.’ As usual they are carrying on, keeping on, doing their duty to their dynasty and to their country. The monarch has the daily three-hour long perusal and signing of Parliamentary business, and constant reception of overseas diplomats and potentates, as well as the obvious tasks – like opening a sewerage plant in Norfolk, (as the 93- year- old Queen did a few weeks ago).

She and other family members carry on with the cutting of ribbons in Wolverhampton, planting trees in Abergavenny, visiting hospitals in Scunthorpe, meeting ambassadors, conferring with charities who need their support, visiting the regiments of the armed forces, pinning medals on veterans, marking anniversaries and state occasions, shaking hands, making small talk, oiling diplomatic relations between countries and peoples, bringing a sense of caring and continuity to society, swotting up  the details of the people they’re meeting and the places they’re visiting, doing the boring unglamorous aspects of being in service, and living their motto: never complain, never explain. It’s served them well for nearly a thousand years. They also know that privilege entails responsibility. It’s called noblesse oblige.

 

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

I needed a cake, but didn’t have the time to nurture a long bake in the oven, so I experimented with this cake that only takes 20 minutes to cook. It was a great success, but tasted even better the next day. It’s all mixed in a saucepan in which 250 gms of butter, one cup of sugar, 2 tablsp of cocoa and one tablesp of golden syrup are melted. Don’t let it boil. When cool, add 2 cups SR flour, one cup of almond meal, a teasp of vanilla essence and a pinch of salt. Mix it all together. No eggs.

Grease and line a cake tin, and bake for 20 minutes only, so it’s a little fudgy. When cool ice with chocolate icing… icing sugar, butter, cocoa and a little milk beaten till smooth. Next time I make it I might experiment with brown sugar …

Food for Thought

Folksinger Pete Seeger has been called America’s tuning fork. He said: ‘I feel most spiritual when I’m out in the woods. I feel part of nature. Or looking up at the stars. I used to say I was an atheist… According to my definition of God, I’m not an atheist. Because I think God is everything. Whenever I open my eyes I’m looking at God. Whenever I’m listening to something I’m listening to God… And maybe I am… I think God is literally everything, because I don’t believe that something can come out of nothing. And so there’s always been something. Always is a long time.’

 

 

 

 

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Filed under consciousness, cookery/recipes, life/style, Queen Elizabeth, Royals, slavery, Thoughts on writing and life, Uncategorized

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November 19, 2019 · 3:27 pm

It isn’t racist to be disappointed

Queen Mary Diamond Bandeau Tiara worn by Meghan Markle on her wedding day

diamond bandeau filigree tiara queen mary meghan markle united kingdom

Hitler said she would make a good queen. He was referring to Wallis Simpson, by then the Duchess of Windsor, after they’d had a friendly get together in pre-war Germany.

I thought of this when I read that someone in the US had said what a good queen Meghan Markle, now Duchess of Sussex would make. And I thought too that neither Hitler, or even Ms Markle had any idea what the concept of the British monarchy was all about as I read the latest press release from a ‘source close to the Duchess’. The release informed us that the Duchess would not be joining the Royal family for Christmas and would be spending Thanksgiving at Frogmore Cottage with her mother, when they would visit a homeless shelter to ‘help the homeless cook traditional stuffed turkey and pumpkin pie’.

This essentially New World party has no relevance to the British, so I did wonder at the announcement of a visit to a local homeless shelter, weeks in advance. Most intending Mother Theresa’s or Lady Bountiful’s perform this sort of philanthropy unobtrusively and without fanfare, with no virtue signalling publicity or photographers on hand.

I wondered too how these lonely desperate people, with no warm home and loving family around, would feel when confronted with a beaming stranger either dressed up to the nines in Givenchy, or sporting skinny jeans and an over-size shirt, and accompanied by the de rigueur security men – slightly bewildered I wouldn’t be surprised.

People who criticise the American addition to the Royal family are usually accused of racism, but this lazy and one-size-fits-all label is not accurate. Prince Harry’s bride was welcomed with open arms, for the sake of the little boy who’d walked behind his mother’s coffin and who had a special place in many English hearts. Everyone bent over backwards to make their union work.

The Queen did an unprecedented thing and invited Meghan to Sandringham for Christmas, to spend with the ‘family she’d never had’, as besotted Prince Harry explained tenderly on radio. Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge was not invited until she was well married, like all the previous fiancees.

When Prince Charles remarried a divorcee, he could not be married in a church according the Church of England rules, and had to have a registry office wedding, and a church blessing afterwards. This requirement was waived for Meghan, also a divorcee, who enjoyed the full panoply of royal privileges, including the traditional loan of one of the Queen’s tiaras, and a carriage ride through Windsor, costing the British taxpayers millions in security. Her wedding cost both the Queen and the taxpayer over $40,000,000 pounds. No one begrudged it. The new bride was welcomed with enthusiasm.

But she never said thank you. What she did do was buy more expensive couture clothes than any other English or European Royal, only a quarter of which were made by British designers.  She flew to New York by private jet for a $350,000 baby shower, she sat in splendid isolation after turfing forty British Wimbledon spectators out of the seats which they had queued and paid for, and assuming that two people who were taking selfies of themselves with Federer in the background were photographing her, had her security guards stop them using their phones.

When her friend Serena Williams was beaten, she showed her disappointment, but did not congratulate the winner, a Canadian girl who was a member of the Commonwealth for which Meghan had been made an ambassador by the Queen. She left as soon as Serena’s match was over, when it would have been both polite and diplomatic as a member of the Royal Family to watch the British Wimbledon champion Andie Murray, who was next up, play his match.

The dog loving English people were puzzled that a dog lover should leave her two rescue dogs behind in Toronto in spite of the unconvincing explanations. They were also puzzled when she and her Prince left the splendour of Kensington Palace, to spend over $3,000,000 on a house at Windsor, with all the extra costs to the taxpayer of security, which were covered when all the Royals shacked up at KP, as Kensington Palace is known.

Writing woke messages saying ‘you are loved’ and ‘you are brave’ on bananas to give to sex workers provoked national hilarity, but it wasn’t seen as so funny when Meghan embarrassingly dodged her royal duty by claiming maternity leave in order not to meet President Trump. Yet she surfaced a few days later to sit in a carriage and stand on the balcony of Buckingham Palace for the Queen’s birthday celebrations.

Turning up to parade down the red carpet at the glamorous ‘Lion King’ London premier in a hideously expensive dress costing $4,924, when Prince Harry should have been at a solemn memorial service with the Royal Marines didn’t go down well either. Telling an African-American star in the line-up, who’d congratulated her on the great job she was doing, that ‘They don’t make it easy for us”, a reference to the English people/plebs who support her extravagant life-style, went down like a brick too.

Neither did it go down well that the couple refused to share the date of their baby’s birth, the names of his godparents or issue any photos of him – traditional Royal custom – which is part of the unspoken contract between the Royals and the public. There was more heartburning when it was discovered that various American TV personalities, including Ellen de Generes, who Meghan had never met before, had had invitations to tea  and were able to boast – on TV – that they had cuddled the baby who was off-limits to the British public.

And more ire, when pictures of good old Archbishop Tutu were taken with the hitherto invisible baby. Many people, myself included, felt that it should have been Thomas Markle, his grandfather, seeing the baby. This is the man who brought up Meghan when her mother was not around during her childhood, and paid for her expensive schooling, university and overseas trips – on one of which Meghan was photographed posing outside Buckingham Palace – though she had told the public that she’d never heard of Prince Harry before she met him!

Thomas Markle is the old man who to date has met neither his son-in-law or his grandson, but according to his daughter, in happier days when she was worried about her freckles, lovingly consoled her with the words that a face without freckles would be like a sky without stars. While he was working at the TV studios, she would turn up after school, and he’d steer her away from facets of the filming he thought in-appropriate for a little girl to watch – a caring father coping with parenting alone while he worked for their living …

The apparent snubs to the Queen in turning down not just the Sandringham Christmas get together, but also the traditional summer gathering of the Royal family at Balmoral, and then zapping off to New York a few days later to watch her friend Serena’s tennis final, has not endeared the Duchess to the British public. None of these faux pas, extravagances, and many other ill-judged actions have anything to do with race.

They are the justified criticisms made of a woman who seems to have no interest in the customs and culture of the family and society she chose to marry into; a woman who, while enjoying all the perks of her extraordinary new life, insists on privacy, and at the same time goes out of her way to be photographed and publicise her doings and achievements on Instagram.

Criticism of the new arrival in the family who has ‘singlehandedly modernised the Royal Family’ according to her PR team, stems from disappointment, not racism. In the unspoken contract and loyalty between the Sovereign and the people, the Royals have various rituals and duties to perform as a quid pro quo for their immensely privileged life-style.

Their profession and ‘career’ is service to their country, to be performed in whatever way the government of the time requires, and observance of ancient precedents. The public knows it’s a daunting task to learn the ropes of this 1,000 -year-old institution, so all they expect is for a new entrant to learn the ways and customs of the institution, using humility, a desire to learn, and determination to do the job.

So the arrival of Meghan who said she was going to hit the ground running, and who seems to feel it’s her role to change the lives of the English people who’ve enjoyed a free society and democracy all their lives; a newbie attempting to educate them about climate change, female empowerment, racism, and other self- appointed missions, irritates them.

They don’t want their lives changed (unless they can enjoy some of the perks of her privileged life-style). They don’t want to be lectured about carbon emissions by someone who flies in private jets, and hops across oceans and continents for holidays, weddings and celebrity occasions.

It doesn’t go down well for someone from another country to seem to criticise the British culture and members of the Royal Family on TV, to tell us that the British stiff upper lip is ‘internally damaging’, and that in spite of no money worries, a healthy baby, a loving husband, a luxurious home, and a wardrobe to die for, she finds life tough and no-one has asked ‘are you okay?’

It was her decision during maternity leave to ask Vogue editor, Edward Enninful, to allow her to guest-edit a controversial edition of that luxury magazine, and her decision too, to organise the design of some fairly ordinary clothes for a charity which had been up and running for some years before. Since most of us cope with our babies plus other challenges without nannies and staff, for their PR staff to use the word ‘gruelling’ to describe their lives (several holidays, overseas trips to tennis and a Rome wedding this year) seems puzzling.

Most people have tough hardworking lives, and find self-pity, a sense of entitlement, and what feels like hypocrisy when actions don’t match words, unattractive. So for all these reasons, and many others, the second American woman to marry into the British Royal family is almost as unpopular as the first one. And as in the case of Wallis, there is great relief that Meghan is not likely to become queen either, barring a complete annihilation of four or five other members of the family.

The saddest thing of all is that so much genuine goodwill towards Prince Harry and Meghan seems to have been squandered, despite the in-ept rescue attempts by their American publicity team, and this has left many loyal supporters of the monarchy throughout the Commonwealth feeling disappointed. To bowdlerise a great Englishmans’s words, ‘never has so much been lost, so quickly, by so few.’

As for the 93- year- old Queen, adapting Shakespeare’s words would no doubt be sadly true for her at the moment: ‘Uneasy lies the head that bears the crown’.

 

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

The cupboard was bare – and the fridge. All I could rustle up the day before our big shop, was one chicken drum stick, half a parsnip, two carrots, half a leek, plenty of onions and my staple, red lentils.

While the onions were having a quick zap to soften them up in the micro- wave, I fried the chicken leg to seal it, and chopped carrots, parsnip and leek small, keeping one carrot back to grate, to give the intending mess of pottage some texture. Onions, chicken and vegetables went into a saucepan, along with two thirds of a cup of washed lentils, garlic, salt, pepper and a chicken cube.

Boil gently for half an hour or until the chicken is falling off the bone. This collection of scraps turned into a thick comforting soup on a cold day.

 

 

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February 20, 2017 · 6:16 pm

Fashion and fun

Image result for diana pics

As I mulled over the ins and outs and ups and downs of buying a grey T-shirt – I’m short of cool T-shirts as my clothes are still packed up in my old school trunk, (few people know what these are nowadays) where they’ve been since we moved to the forest. We’re building onto the little cabin we inherited when we moved here, and I’m still, as it were, existing on the iron rations I put into a small suit case when we came here. Somehow I hadn’t envisaged managing without my extensive wardrobe for months.

There’s a word for Foodies like me – is there also one for clothes maniacs… clothies? If there is, that’s me. But my frivolous machinations ground to a halt when I stumbled on an article about the latest exhibition of Diana’s clothes.  Everyone knows who Diana is, don’t they? The ingenuous teenager who married her Prince, and discovered on their honeymoon that he was still in touch with his long- term married mistress? The anorexic skinny beauty who blossomed into a glorious woman, who wore heavenly clothes throughout the various stages of her life? She’d have been fifty-six  this year.

The exhibition seems to chronicle the trajectory of the Princess’s life, from the ingenue soft blouses and dresses worn by the young bride, through to some of the ravishing evening dresses she began wearing as she gained her confidence. Then come the dresses which showed off her figure and astonishing beauty… and with the clothes, all those photos showing her a step away from Prince Charles, with symbolic distance between them, as they arrived together with her wearing these beautiful clothes.

She found her confidence when she embarked on her affair with her riding instructor, Guards officer James Hewitt, the man who’s since earned the well-deserved name of ‘Love-rat’. He wrote several books, and made millions out of publishing her letters and detailing their affair, which began when a miserable Diana had discovered that Charles had re-newed his affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles.

The legions of Diana’s admirers (I was one of them) were furious that, as the Guardian once put it: ‘an older woman with no dress sense and birds-nest hair had trounced the people’s fairy-tale Princess? Who did she think she was?’

The story goes that some of her infuriated supporters even pelted the hapless Camilla with bread rolls when she went shopping in her local Wiltshire supermarket. Which reminded me of a previous Charles and his mistress, the much more attractive Charles the second. His witty lover, Nell Gwyn, was subjected to much the same abuse, only verbal as her carriage passed. The angry citizens thought this was the carriage of Charles’ French Catholic mistress. Nell pulled down her carriage window, and smiling at the hostile faces confronting her, uttered the immortal words: “Good people, I am the Protestant whore.” Which dispersed the crowds.

There’s no record of Camilla’s reaction to the bread rolls – in fact, throughout the years, she always remained silent.

But back to our muttons–or moutons in French. The dresses chart Diana’s life, but don’t, I think, include the famous little black dress she wore the night Charles admitted adultery on television. The tall, slim ravishing blonde with legs to die for, stole his thunder effortlessly in the sensational black dress, which she had had in her wardrobe for two years and never worn before.

All her dresses had built-in bras, so no bra straps showing – and they were also designed so there was never the dreaded ‘visible panty line (VPL). Disappointingly to me, the red jacket and purple skirt she wore when sitting in front of the Taj Mahal, alone and making a statement, is not in the exhibition. Red and purple – who else would wear such a brilliant combination?

That was one of the things I missed after Diana’s tragic and devastating death, the fun of filling my eyes with her gorgeous outfits. And then the jewels –  costume brooches worn in unexpected places, dancing with a priceless emerald necklace turned into an American Indian type head-band worn across her forehead, faux pearls slung backwards and knotted over a plunging backless velvet dress…

Diana’s successor, the ex- Kate Middleton, or Katherine as she is known to her family, often seems a careful, rather dull dresser, except on grand occasions when she looks wonderful.  So I’ve become an afficionado of other less well known royals on the world stage, though apparently doted on in their own countries.

The most flamboyant is Queen Maxima of the Netherlands, former business woman and daughter of a minister in one of  Argentina’s murderous and tyrannical regimes. She overcame this hurdle to marrying the heir to the Dutch throne, and has now evolved an interesting style of dressing. I marvel at her huge hats, ponchos, and daring colour combinations.

The Belgian Queen Mathilde, born a noblewoman in Belgium and formerly speech therapist and psychologist, is another blonde beauty with a great sense of style, and great legs too. She wears bright colours and elegant matching hats… the Royal way of dressing Queen Elizabeth has pioneered and perfected. Queen Letizia, the ex-television anchor and newsreader on Spanish TV, who also captured a Crown Prince, has a severe, solemn beauty. Her exquisite clothes have the same rather austere, elegant quality, but I don’t feel the joyfulness of Diana’s style – which for me was the benchmark of fun and fashion.

Crown Princess Mary of Denmark, the former Australian PR consultant, who spent three years learning Danish before marrying her Prince, is an attractive brunette like Kate, and they look like sisters when seen together. She always looks stylish, poised, and wears interesting clothes. But somehow with all these lovely Royals, there’s none of the excitement and joie de vivre that Diana projected in her gorgeous clothes. Queen Maxima comes the nearest to projecting that excitement while doing her round of good works and international visits like all the rest of them – shaking hands with popes, presidents, sovereigns and sheiks.

Needless to say, all these women sport magnificent jewels and glittering tiaras when required. I doubt that the latest fashionista to loom on our horizon owns a tiara – but then again – her extraordinary husband may have bought one to demonstrate that he can mix it with the best of them! If so, it’s hidden away at the back of a wardrobe in Trump Tower – or more likely stashed away at the bank.

When Melania Trump appeared at her husband’s inauguration in that delicious, pale blue outfit, I thought, aha, another glorious clothes horse in the mould of a previous beautiful First Lady. But we see so very little of her. When we do, her clothes are gorgeous… yet there’s so much controversy swirling around her, that rather like Carla Bruni, President Zarkozy’s beautiful model wife, it’s hard to enjoy the spectacle whole-heartedly.

‘The apparel oft proclaims the man,’ Polonius advised his son Laertes, and like everything in Shakespeare’s famous speech, it still rings true. So how does my grey T-shirt stand up to all these gorgeous outfits worn by glamorous women?

I want to wear it with grey trousers brought from Marks and Sparks in Plymouth, Devon, over ten years ago when flares had come back briefly, and with flat, grey lace-ups which assist my broken leg to walk – a special offer from a mail order catalogue – two pairs for fifteen dollars – how could I go past them? I’ll wear a grey, black and red scarf to brighten up the grey – I’ve had it for twenty years – it was a Christmas present from a Dutch friend who told me she’d found it on a second- hand stall at the local market. And of course – red dangly earrings – all so appropriate in a remote forest far from the fashion centres of the world. But as you can see, I never give up!!!

Food for threadbare gourmets

Caught on the hop when invited to an impromptu lunch tomorrow by a bachelor neighbour. Can I bring something I foolishly asked? Yes, something sweet, was the prompt reply. We don’t want to go into town to shop for another few days and I haven’t bothered to keep all my stocks of goodies since we are staying of sweet stuff, and I only cook the barest minimum since my game leg finds it hard to stand.

I finally remembered my emergency store –  tiny pastry tartlets in a sealed pack, and lemon curd in the fridge. I usually serve them with crème fraiche, and am leary of whipped cream separating. So will just have to bite the bullet and whip the cream with icing sugar which helps it to stay stiff. I simply use two tablespoons to a cup of cream… so much for giving up sugar!

Food for thought

Lift up the self by the Self.

And don’t let the self droop down

For the Self is the self’s only friend

And the self is the Self’s only foe.

Bhagavad Gita   Chapter 6, verse  5

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January 25, 2017 · 10:14 am

Netflix Royals -Margaret, the wild card – last instalment

She was a woman who in her time played many parts, to misquote Shakespeare.

Starting life as her father’s pet, she became fashion’s darling, tragic heroine, the centre of swinging London with her brilliant randy husband, England’s first famous cougar and tabloid fodder, a ‘loose cannon’, and finally the sad woman known as ‘walking wounded’ in London circles.

No, the touching scene where their father made the Princesses promise undying loyalty to each other, didn’t really happen. Much more dramatic was the real moment missed by script-writers,  when he came back to his cosy non-royal home in Piccadilly after the abdication, and was greeted by his daughters aged ten and six in the hall, who both curtsied to him deeply, which shook him to his core (his wife was upstairs in bed with flu, overcome by all the long-drawn abdication dramas).

Princess Elizabeth soon began her apprenticeship, coached by her father, and tirelessly overseen by Queen Mary, who took the Princesses on cultural outings, checked on their education, and told their mother, the Queen, they needed more books. Typical of her light-hearted and fun-loving nature. the Queen responded by buying the complete works of P.G. Wodehouse! She also frequently interrupted the children’s lessons to take them off for some fun, to the chagrin of their governess, ‘Crawfie”.

Margaret didn’t have to study the way her sister did, and grew up to be the source of her father’s entertainment and relaxation. This special relationship ended when she was twenty-one and he died so unexpectedly. With no father and no role, equerry Peter Townsend became even more important to her than he had been since she fell in love with him in 1947, when the Royal family were touring South Africa. She was very demanding towards the man she loved, who was eighteen years older than her, and never took any account – as neither had the Royal family – of his duty to his wife and children.

Much has always been made of the fact that he was the “innocent party” in the ensuing divorce, but a husband who neglects his wife and children for his devotion to his employer, and the employer’s pretty daughter, has as much responsibility as has a lonely wife seeking love and support elsewhere.

The fact of his so-called innocence encouraged both he and Margaret to feel they could marry. Unlike the court, particularly Alan Lascelles, the Queen’s authoritative private secretary, (“are you mad or bad?”) the Queen was sympathetic.

The situation burst upon the consciousness of the world at the Coronation when Princess Margaret, decked out in diamonds and diadem and long velvet train, stood outside the Abbey chatting to the handsome equerry, and in a familiar and intimate gesture flicked an imaginary piece of fluff off his uniform as she smiled up into his eyes. The picture went around the world.

The Netflix scenes of Townsend standing on the steps of the aircraft taking the Queen to Ireland, and waving back to the imaginary cheers of the crowd were mind-bogglingly crass. Townsend was a sensible, sensitive man, far too intelligent to behave in such a tactless way, any more than he would have called the Queen by her private childhood nickname,’ Lilibet’, (I cringed as he did). He didn’t go to Ireland, but to Brussels to wait out his time.

These were the years when five foot two, blue-eyed Margaret with an eighteen-inch waist, became the darling of fashion. It was at the first Ascot of the reign when she really made her mark. It was, like ‘My Fair Lady’, a black and white Ascot, as the court were still in six months mourning for the King. By June, ladies were permitted to wear black and white, or grey, and the Princess appeared in an elegant, grey chiffon dress which set all the fashion watchers talking.

Like the Queen she also wore striking black and white outfits on the other racing days and her reputation was made. She became the most glamorous princess in the world,  photographed in an exquisite Christian Dior dress on her twenty first birthday at Balmoral (she’d always hankered for a Dior dress, like just about everyone back then) and almost as dazzling as Diana before her .

When Townsend returned from Brussels, and the pair spent their anguished time together in a friend’s country house, the Netflix script writers missed a rather delicious touch… the lurking press were getting most of their inside information from the ten-year-old daughter of the host and hostess. She was having the time of her life creeping out of the house to give reporters the latest on what was going on inside the house!

Margaret’s decision, which was couched in heroic terms, had more to do with the fact that their marriage wasn’t going to work – he had no money or home – couldn’t afford even one servant. Princess Margaret, on the other hand, was accustomed to the grandest of life-styles and loved the high life. She simply wouldn’t have been able to fill her time with genteel coffee-parties with other RAF wives, or live a quiet life out of circulation, away from all her rich, grand friends. The renunciation was a recognition that she couldn’t live without her Royal status and money, rather than a religious decision

Townsend himself wrote in his autobiography years later: “She could have married me only if she had been prepared to give up everything—her position, her prestige, her privy purse. I simply hadn’t the weight, I knew it, to counterbalance all she would have lost.”

With a bleak Townsend back in Brussels, the Princess embarked on her heady life of partying with all the richest, titled, and most eligible men of the time, who became known as the Margaret Set. It was during this time that she also became famous for what can only be called bitchiness -snobbish put-downs, spilling her glass of wine over the dress of a girl in a more fetching dress than hers, making people stay up into the small hours when they were tired or pregnant, obligatory curtseying, trading on her Royalty, which she did for the rest of her life.

She was twenty-nine when Townsend wrote to tell her he was marrying a Belgian girl much younger than her. Shortly afterwards she announced her engagement to the bohemian, Eton-educated society photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones. Courtiers and many others were shocked (all the officers in the mess I was stationed in at the time were angry that she was throwing herself away!)

However, Tony the commoner was created Earl of Snowdon, and got on famously, not just with the Queen and Prince Philip, but with the Queen Mother too. They remained friends until her death, and Snowdon continued to photograph the Royal family all his life.

The witty, brilliant, sexy Princess and the witty, brilliant, sexy photographer had more in common than most people realised, and for some years, they were the centre of the sixties hedonistic, sparkling world, surrounded by writers, painters, actors, wits and most of the names of swinging high society.

The marriage finally foundered on their in-ability to compromise with each other – and it has to be said, by the petty irritations of Royal life – the Princess’s maid would bring her a cup of tea in the morning but not Tony, while their nanny resisted him ever visiting the nursery. They both began affairs -Margaret’s rather more transient than Tony’s, and her first one in 1966 only a few years after their marriage .

Margaret then took up with a young man seventeen years her junior, an aristocratic out-of-work hippie and sometime gardener, Roddy Llewellyn. This was the most exciting tabloid fodder the press had had in years, on top of all the rumoured affairs, rows, and royal rages. Pictures were taken of them frolicking in the sea on holiday on Mustique, the West Indian island where Margaret had a house. This triggered Princess and Snowdon into announcing they were divorcing.

Newspapers demanded Margaret be taken off the Civil List which paid her a large sum, while Labour MPs denounced her as “a royal parasite” and a “floosie”. On 11 July 1978, the Snowdons’ divorce was finalised.  In December that same year, Snowdon re-married. Margaret never did. When after some years, Roddy Llewellyn told her he was marrying someone he’d known for years, Margaret never found another real lover, though she had plenty of friendships.

For the rest of her life she was known as ‘walking-wounded’ in London society. She continued to smoke and drink heavily, party with her friends on Mustique, and eventually to enjoy her grandchildren by her admirably well-adjusted children, David and Sara.

She had several mild strokes, and then, in Mustique, she stepped into a bath which she didn’t realise was scalding. Her badly burned legs never healed, and neither did she. She spent her remaining years in a wheel chair and died at seventy-two, four months before her mother, in 2002.

It’s said that her chief legacy is that her divorce made it easier for her sister’s children – Prince Charles, Prince Andrew and Princess Anne – to divorce. Her ashes were placed inside her father’s tomb, and she wrote her own rather revealing epitaph. It’s carved on a memorial stone in St Georges Chapel Windsor:

We thank thee Lord who by thy spirit doth our faith restore
When we with worldly things commune & prayerless close our door
We lose our precious gift divine to worship and adore
Then thou our Saviour, fill our hearts to love thee evermore.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

What to do with two pork chops? I decided we’d have them for lunch, since I prefer a very light supper. I fried them until they were nearly done, then poured in cream, grated a large courgette into the bubbling cream, added a chicken bouillon cube, a teaspoonful of garlic from a jar (lazy), a teaspoon of Dijon mustard, and plenty of grated nutmeg and black pepper. I let this all bubble until the cream was thick and crusty round the edges, the chops cooked, and then stirred in torn up leaves of spinach. Served with creamy mashed potato, we had all our vegetables suffused with the fragrant creamy sauce.

Food for Thought

Think not of the amount to be accomplished, the difficulties to be overcome, or the end to be attained, but set earnestly at the little task at your elbow, letting that be sufficient for the day.

Sir William Osler,  famed physician 1849 – 1919

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January 10, 2017 · 1:19 pm

Netflix-The Crown-The truth about the Royals?

Once upon a time, as all good fairy tales start (does anyone tell them nowadays?) I was commissioned to write a book about the Royals who had visited this country (New Zealand). They were many, beginning with the first Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Victoria’s second son, and continuing with today’s crop of Royals, including Charles and Diana.

Though I was only given five months in which to write this masterpiece, (I deduced that someone fitter than I had dropped out of the project at the last minute) I couldn’t resist doing a mass of quite unnecessary research, which meant that in the end I was reduced to writing from seven am in the morning to seven pm at night.

I was already well placed to write this book, though when I received the phone call from the publishers asking if I would a write a book for them, my flippant reply – ‘as long as it’s not a book on engineering…’ – did not endear me to the humour-less editor I worked with.

But years before, in idle moments in the magazine office I worked in, I had found a tome on Queen Mary. It was written by James Pope-Hennessey, who was what the Royal family call “a safe pair of hands”, meaning they were prepared to talk to him, open the archives, let him read letters and trust him not to say anything derogatory. His book started me off on all the other Royal biographies long before writing my book. Thus, Harold Nicolson writing his matching tome on George V, Queen Mary’s husband, was also considered a ‘safe’ pair.

So Pope-Hennessey for example, refrained from telling us that Queen Mary was a famous kleptomaniac. And well-placed gossip has it that after her death, her grand-daughter, this Queen and daughter in law, Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, had to make a number of embarrassing visits to stately homes around England in order to return various items of value to their rightful owners.

I am not a ‘safe ‘pair of hands, but I am a ‘truthful’ one, and was therefore quite bothered when watching Netflix’s work of fiction masquerading as fact. So much so that when I read they were hoping for a congratulatory phone call from the palace, I laughed out loud… I don’t think they should hold their breath. I don’t think the Queen would appreciate seeing her handsome intelligent, hard-working husband portrayed as a temperamental, insensitive, adolescent lout.

He once wrote, in a resigned letter to the film and stage star Pat Kirkwood, with whom he was accused of having an extra-marital affair: ‘Invasion of privacy, invention and false quotations are the bane of our existence.’ The facts in this case were that Baron the photographer, was Pat Kirkwood’s boyfriend and he took Philip to meet her after her show. They spent the night dining, dancing and ended up in Baron’s flat having scrambled eggs for breakfast. (more on this later)

Philip’s ancestry was much more royal than the Queen’s (she was only half royal, her mother simply being an aristocrat) and he was as accustomed to princes and palaces as she was. He had experienced the discipline of the navy since he was a teenager, and had a gallant war record, so he would never have shirked his Royal duties in the adolescent way Netflix writers portrayed… but back to him in the next blog.

There’s so much to say that I just have to take it in  chronological order. Eileen Atkins does a peerless job at portraying Queen Mary, but lots of fictional scenes there too… on the other hand, they missed a wonderful true moment of the real Queen Mary advancing on the prime minister, Mr Baldwin during the Abdication crisis, wringing her hands, and exclaiming in a distraught and un-queenly fashion quite unlike her – “Here’s a pretty kettle of fish!”.

The subject of this remark, her son and son of her husband, George V, who had said: “The boy will ruin himself in twelve months,” was the new King Edward. (He did it in eight months.) Alex Jennings who plays him- and who played Prince Charles memorably in the film ‘The Queen’ – portrays a much stronger and slightly more likeable character than the real flaky king and prince.

Private secretary Sir Tommy Lascelles – played with great veracity in the film – had resigned from his service when he was Prince of Wales, appalled by the Prince’s louche and reckless way of life, woman-ising, drinking, and neglecting his duties. Now the reluctant new King Edward inherited the reluctant Lascelles from George V who had re-employed Lascelles, and the carelessness and irresponsibility of Edward were even more marked now, to the dismay of everyone close to him, not just his private secretary.

Government officials began censoring the documents they sent to him for signature in the red boxes for example, after state papers and documents were returned with wine-stains and finger marks, and it was rumoured that they were being passed around the social set partying around his desk – Mrs Simpson among them. It’s notable that in all the years of this Queen’s reign she has never shown the contents of the red  boxes to her trustworthy husband.

It was strident, social-climbing, twice married Mrs Simpson who is credited with links to Ribbentrop, the infamous German ambassador hanged at the Nuremburg Trials and influencing Edward in his notorious pro-Nazi views. She was also famous for flaunting around London the wonderful jewels the besotted Edward showered upon her, and which caused so much gossip at the time. (There were people who felt a statue should be raised in her honour, they were so thankful to her for being instrumental in getting rid of a king who would probably have brought down the throne.)

Unlike the Netflix version, the ex-king was never short of money – he was in fact, a very rich man, having amassed a fortune from the Duchy of Cornwall all the time he was Prince of Wales, (like the present holder of the title) and sold Balmoral and Sandringham to his rather more cash-strapped brother, the reluctant new King. Once on the loose, married to the woman he loved, the now Duke of Windsor set the pattern of endless socialising he and the Duchess became famous for.He also gallivanted off to see Hitler, who planned to re-instate him, and went on record as saying that the Duchess of Windsor ‘would have made a good queen’ – nuf’ said.

I won’t go into their disloyal war record, which began with the Duke (who had been given the rank of general) deserting without leave his military post in Paris when the Germans were arriving, without even letting their devoted, but unpaid staff know. On the other hand, they arranged for the Germans to guard their Paris apartments, which the Germans did, sealing and protecting them throughout the war… the Windsor’s were probably the only people in the whole of Europe whose home and possessions were intact after the war.

Windsor never had cosy little breakfasts discussing helpful tips on kingship with the present Queen, a la the Crown and Netflix. Apart from his visit to England for George VI ‘s funeral, she didn’t meet him until 1965 when he came to England for a visit, and then in ‘67. Finally, on a state visit to Paris in 1972, she took tea with him.

Sir Tommy’s Lascelles diaries are an invaluable record of much of this time, witty, irascible, authoritative, erudite, in the know… and almost family. In the photo of his daughter’s wedding in ‘45, the whole Royal family (what he termed a ‘pride of Royals’) were there, from Queen Mary and the King,  down to Princess Margaret – with Townsend in the background.

The good looking and elegant Townsend he termed: ‘a devilish bad equerry’. Among other true-to-life portraits was his picture of Churchill dining at Buckingham Palace the night news from Alamein was hoped for. At last, unable to wait any longer, the Prime Minister excused himself and went off and telephoned his office.

He returned with Lascelles, ambling down the golden corridor  singing ‘with little evidence of musical talent’ in Lascelles’ acid account: ‘Roll out the barrel’ with gusto, to the astonishment of the footmen standing to attention. This story, as with so many other references to Churchill dining at the palace, gives the lie to the ridiculous scene of the Prime Minister refusing to sit before his new sovereign with all the daft waffling about not sitting in her presence.

He’d sat in her presence and that of his previous sovereign, plenty of times over the last eight or more years, and had known Elizabeth more or less for most of her life, remarking favourably on her appearance when she was two and taking time out from running the war and the country in 1941, to send her red roses on her fifteenth birthday.

I can’t resist writing in my next blog about the skewed facts and in-accuracies about George VI and his daughters – Princess Margaret and the present Queen – and the truth about Prince Philip. The same writer who wrote the successful West-end play and film called ‘The Audience’, about the Queen and her prime ministers, wrote this series.

I walked out of that film after half an hour, in spite of Helen Mirren, as I found it painful watching so many imaginative reconstructions then! So no wonder I find this series hard to swallow. I know it’s meant to be entertainment but the facts are just as entertaining as the fiction being served up… and the fiction seems rather hurtful to some of the characters.

“More to come”, as we used to write at the bottom of each page of a story in the newsroom before the days of computers ended hand delivered copy! As a journalist for most of my life, facts matter. Concocting a good story is not my line…

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

It seems appropriate to share a recipe with a Royal theme, so the first version of this dish known as Coronation Chicken was created for the Queen’s coronation. This version by Lady Maclean is the one I prefer.

Taking enough cold cooked chicken for four, stir it into a mix of good mayonnaise, curry power, golden syrup and cream to make a creamy consistency, and deliciously tangy and sweet taste.

The key is the cold rice which is served with it. Make a good vinaigrette dressing with a teaspoonful each of Dijon mustard, and sugar, plus plenty of black pepper. Defrost a cupful or more of green peas, and soak them in boiling water until soft.

Do the same with a good handful of sultanas. In a frying pan quickly toast a generous cupful of slivered almonds (watch them – they burn quickly). Finely chop a generous handful of parsley, and just before serving, mix all these ingredients with the rice.

Food for Thought

This poem was written by fifteen -year- old Minnie Haskell, and George VI recited it in his 1939 Christmas speech, the first Christmas of the war. The Queen, who was 13 at the time, gave it to him, she had found it in a privately printed book of poetry….

THE GATE OF THE YEAR

And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:
“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”
And he replied:
“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God.
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”

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October 30, 2013 · 8:34 pm

A great-grandfather

100_0500While those who were interested in the christening at St James Palace were focused on his famous great- grandmother, I was more interested in the baby’s great-grandfather. The Queen’s husband was a year older than HRH Prince George of Cambridge when he escaped with his life, lying in a hastily improvised cradle which was actually a drawer from a chest of drawers.

His father, Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, had been arrested in a Greek revolution in 1922, five years after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. His mother, Princess Alice, Queen Victoria’s great-grand-daughter, once known as the prettiest princess in Europe, was the niece of the deposed and dead Russian Tsarina Alexandra.

One of Victoria’ numerous grandchildren, King George V of England was cousin both to Tsar Nicholas of Russia – in fact they looked so alike it was hard to tell them apart –  and also to Tsarina Alexandra, and he had refused them refuge in 1917, for fear of provoking revolution in England. So his cousins and their children, the four ravishing archduchesses, and the haemophiliac Tsarevitch were murdered in the cellar at Ekaterinberg.

It was this dreadful memory which spurred George V into sending a battleship to rescue his Greek relatives, taking off Philip’s father from Greece, and then picking up Philip, his mother and sisters who were living under surveillance in Corfu. They were all decanted at Malta. The family went to Paris, where it dissolved. Prince Andrew retired to Monte Carlo to become a playboy, Philip’s mother who was born deaf, though she had learned to lip-read in three languages, retired to a sanatorium in Switzerland with schizophrenia, and the sisters married German princelings, one of them at sixteen. The little boy Philip was shuttled between boarding school in England, his sisters in Germany, and his grandmother in England, another of Queen Victoria’s grandchildren, and his uncles, one of whom was Lord Mountbatten, later murdered by the IRA with members of his family. Philip rarely saw his mother.

When his close sister Cecile, perished in a plane crash on her way to a wedding with her husband, two children and other family members, Philip, by then seventeen, walked in her funeral procession, just as he walked with his grandson William in his mother Diana’s funeral procession sixty years later. In between he’d attended Salem School which aimed to: ‘Build up the imagination of the boy of decision and the will-power of the dreamer, so that in future wise men will have the nerve to lead the way they have shown, and men of action will have the vision to imagine the consequences of their decisions.’  Kurt Hahn, the headmaster, fiercely scrutinised the strength of character of any child admitted to the school. So even though his sister and her idealistic husband subsidised the school, Philip was put through the hoops to prove his worth, and with those values, no wonder the Nazis closed in on Hahn, forcing him to flee to Scotland where he founded Gordonstoun School, and where Philip ended up too.

When war came, Philip joined the Royal Navy, and so for seven years was cut off from his sisters in Germany. Now he camped with his grandmother and an uncle until they both died, and then moved in with Lord Mountbatten – not an easy childhood, with absent parents and no home. Yet the combination of heredity (and there’s no room here to go into his fascinating forbears), environment, set-backs and an active enquiring intelligence resulted in an interesting man of many parts. He was also one of the handsomest young men in the world, as a quick glance at his wedding photos show.

No snob either – at his wedding in Westminster Abbey where everyone brought out their jewels and furs for the first time since the war began, he wore his shabby well-worn naval uniform, disdaining to wangle clothing coupons in order to re-place it. But he had changed his name from Schleswig- Holstein – Sonderburg – Glucksburg to Mountbatten – well you would, wouldn’t you?

He had made a love match with the young Princess Elizabeth, and though they knew what the future held, they didn’t envisage her father dying at 54 and thus changing their lives forever. Philip was devastated, as it meant leaving his naval career. While the Queen is always the soul of discretion, the Duke of Edinburgh, as he became, has always been famous for being outspoken, direct, and frequently controversial. But he’s always brought humour and humanity to the boring protocols of Royalty. When he met Malala at Buckingham Palace recently, he said to her – accurately – “in this country, parents send their children to school to get them out of the house”, causing Malala to break into laughter, and clap her hand over her mouth, and her father to laugh out loud too.

Unlike the consort of Dutch Queen Juliana, he has never caused a huge scandal over dishonest corporate dealings, and unlike Queen Margaretha of Denmark’s husband, he’s never stomped off in a hissy fit and disappeared for days at a big Royal wedding, because he felt he wasn’t getting the respect he deserved. Unlike the Spanish King, he hasn’t gone off on African safari shooting elephants with a well-established mistress, and unlike the King of Sweden he’s never had a string of other women either. He enjoys the company of women – with four sisters that’s a given, but though Fleet Street has tried very hard, it’s never been able to pin anything on him.

If Prince George’s parents are sensible, they’ll go to him for advice, as well as to Mrs Middleton. Though the Queen is famous for indulging her children and not reprimanding them, Philip was the head of their family and his philosophy for bringing up children was wise and kind.

Talking of teenagers he told one biographer “Children go through enormous changes. For a time they’re in phase with life around them, then they go out of phase and become unliveable with, and everything they do is wrong and cross-grained and maddening – and then suddenly it all comes right for a bit – then they go off on another tack…

“It’s no good saying do this, do that, don’t do this, don’t do that. You can warn them about certain things, that’s about the most you can do, or you can say , this is the situation you’re in, these are the choices, on balance it looks as though this is the sensible one, go away and think it over, and come back and let me know what you think.”

Philip said he felt that his children’s feelings never went unconsidered or that reasonable requests were denied:

“It’s very easy when children want to do something, to say no immediately. I think it’s quite important not to give an unequivocal answer at once. Much better to think it over. Then if you eventually say no I think they really accept it. If you start by saying no, and they persist in the argument  until you realise you could perfectly well have said yes, you get into a situation where they won’t ask you any more, or you find you’re stopping them doing things which in fact it would be perfectly reasonable for them to do.”

He’s used his position to further and encourage innovation in industry, and championed the environment and preserving wildlife before anyone else was green. Some would think that the luxury and splendour in which he has lived since becoming the Queen’s consort is a good swap for the normal life he was so reluctant to give up, his career in the navy and his privacy. But for an intelligent man of action, who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, it must have been a tough life, always one step behind his wife. He has often been misunderstood, and often doesn’t  get the credit for his indispensable common sense,  for his fortitude, and the deep loyalty and love   he’s always given his family –  Queen and country have been lucky to have him, and so is his great-grandson George.

 

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

The asparagus season is just beginning, and though it’s hard to go past lightly steamed asparagus and melted butter, I also enjoy it placed on some silver foil, sprinkled with olive oil, salt and pepper, covered and baked for 15 minutes or so in a medium oven. Or steamed, blanched, and eaten with a Japanese dressing of one teasp dried mustard, one teasp hot water, one egg yolk, one tablesp dark soy sauce, one teasp freshly chopped ginger or half of dried, and salt to taste. Mix the mustard with the water, add the other ingredients, and pour over the asparagus. Eat within three hours.

Food for thought

We have enough people who tell it like it is – now we could use a few who tell it like it can be.                  Robert Orben, American comedy writer and Gerald Ford’s speech-writer.

 

 

 

 

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July 21, 2013 · 4:38 am

Not Royal but Remarkable

100_0175The attention of the whole country was focussed on a charming country house set amid quiet leafy lanes. Everyone was waiting for the Royal baby to be born. The Royal mother had gone home to her mother to have her first baby, which would be the Queen’s great grandson. And it would be the first time in history that there had been three generations of heirs to the throne. When the baby was born, he and his mother stayed with their grandmother at White Lodge for another six weeks.

 So many people wanted to congratulate Princess May, who later became Queen Mary, that a marquee was set up on the lawn for hundreds of people to sign the visitors’ book. Queen Victoria came over from Windsor to see the baby, bringing her grand-daughter Alex, and her fiancée- soon to become last Tsar and Tsarina of Russia and eventually meet their fate at Ekaterinburg.

 History repeats itself. A hundred and nineteen years later, another mother- to- be and baby are keeping everyone waiting.  Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge is going home to her mother’s country home for six weeks, and her baby is also the third in line to the throne. But her baby is the lucky one, whatever lies ahead. And this baby’s great grandmother, Queen Elizabeth, is also awaiting news of the birth at Windsor.

 The baby born to Princess May was David, better known as Edward V111, the only king to have abdicated. His mother was not a natural mother, and left him to his nanny. She used to pinch the baby before he came into the room in the evening to see his parents, so he entered, crying, and was hastily sent back in disgrace to his nanny. When he was three this woman had a nervous breakdown, and it was discovered that she had not had a day off in three years.

 The next generation was this Queen, and her mother used her own old nanny – Alah, who gave the Queen and Princess Margaret a happy tranquil childhood. This was not the case for the Queens’ children, who had a fierce old dragon to look after them. Like all the Royal children before them, except for Queen Alexandra’s, Charles and his brothers and sisters too only saw their mother for an hour before bed-time, and for a short time in the morning. Someone who knew the Queen well has commented that if she had given her children the same time and attention she had given to her horses, things might have turned out differently.

 We all know that Charles’ wife Diana was a devoted mother. But she was back at work within two months carrying out Royal duties, leaving William in the care of his nanny Barbara Barnes. He adored her, and one day after Diana found him cuddled up in bed in the morning with his nanny, she couldn’t cope with this competition so Barbara Barnes left when he was four…  a huge emotional blow for him.

 So his decision and his wife’s to manage without a nanny is a huge breakthrough in the pattern of Royal maternal and emotional deprivation! Catherine – as she is known in her family rather than the media’s Kate – is the daughter of a devoted hands- on mother. Carol Middleton has endured many slights for her humble background as a working- class builder’s daughter, and as an upwardly mobile air hostess.

 But the slim, elegant figure in pale blue who arrived at Westminster Abbey for her daughter’s wedding is a remarkable woman. When her children went to Marlborough other parents said they just gave up – they couldn’t cope with the care that she gave her children right down the beautifully embroidered and hand sewn Cash’s name-tapes on their clothes. We all had these name tapes in my day, but most people use indelible marking pencils these days. She didn’t just give her own children hampers of tuck food, but also supplied a girl from a broken home with a hamper too.

 When her flamboyant younger brother who she had always mothered, was set up by the press for a drug sting, rather than belabour him for the bad publicity, she rang and apologised that because of their public profile with Kate, he had been targeted. She’s kind, sensible and conscientious.

 And as everyone knows she is the creator and driving force behind the thriving business which supports their now rich life-style. When Catherine was born, her mother devised a little business from her kitchen table so that she could stay at home with the children. From this grew their party-bags empire.

 William spends much time in her home with great enjoyment, savouring the tight-knit family and loving informality he never knew. Carole Middleton sounds as though she’ll be the perfect grandmother – always there, experienced, loving, and well-adjusted. So this baby, born in the green English country-side will have all the good fairies ranged on his/her side, and people watchers and royalty fans will have a new and intriguing family saga to watch.

 And the builder’s daughter born in a council house, brought up by working class parents with the values of hard work, thrift and good manners will be the the most important maker and shaper of a modern king or queen – if the monarchy lasts for another fifty years.

 Walter Bagehot, the Victorian authority on Royalty famously wrote that a ‘Princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact”, and the birth of a new prince or princess to a couple who we’ve followed with various degrees of interest for years is magnified also. To see Diana’s son emerge from all his childhood traumas to become a father in his own right is of immense interest to many of us, monarchists or not… there’s something irresistible about watching glamour and goodness combined with history, high fashion, drama and domesticity. And this is where Carole Middleton- grandmother- waiting, steps onto the stage to join the other players !

 

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

 I get bored with bread ! So sometimes I make something else to go with bread and cheese – this is a courgette loaf, good with soft blue cheese, or even just good old Cheddar. Mix two cups of SR flour with one cup of grated courgette/zucchini, half a teasp salt, one teasp mild curry powder, and a cup of grated cheese like Cheddar.  Add a quarter of a cup of oil, one egg and one and three quarters of a cup of milk.

 Lightly mix and tip into a greased loaf tin. Sprinkle the top with grated cheese and bake in a hot oven for forty minutes or so until brown. Switch the oven down after ten to fifteen minutes if it starts to brown too quickly. Serve warm with butter and cheese for a tasty supper…

 Food for Thought

 The feminine principle is the eagerness to collaborate rather than compete, it is the eagerness to relate rather than stand out as an individual, it is the longing for harmony and community and caring and nurturing.

 Lynne Twist –  Global activist, fundraiser, speaker, consultant, coach and author. Dedicated to global initiatives that serve humanity.

 

 

 

 

 

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March 7, 2013 · 9:03 pm

The Queen!

100_0205This post has been re-blogged for the reasons in my latest post The Tragic and Hilarious Life of a Blogger

I’ve just seen a photograph of this radiant elderly woman coming out of hospital, her immaculate white hair shining against the bright red, exquisitely tailored coat which she wore adorned with a simple diamond brooch( if any diamond brooch is simple). Her eyes were shining and her smile sparkling.

She’s eighty-six and the most photographed woman in the world, one of the busiest and most active, and these days, one of the best dressed women in the world too. Once Bobo, her Scottish nursery maid from childhood -who became her dresser – died at 89, Angela Kelly, the new dresser arrived. Suddenly instead of the frumpy clothes chosen by the un-imaginative Bobo who was the despair of all the couturiers who dressed the Queen, the vibrant and now beloved Angela, has transformed the Queen’s clothes and her image.

Angela, who has a broad Liverpool’ Scouse’ accent, and was the daughter of a crane driver, is a creative and vivacious woman with a wonderful sense of colour and design. She designs most of the Queen’s clothes now.

So the once dowdy but beautiful Queen has now blossomed into this stunning looking woman who wears clear jewel-like colours – purple,  primrose, turquoise and leaf green, bright red, and pure white with the matching hats that define her inimitable style. Her see-through umbrellas have a matching coloured handle and are edged with the matching colours.

She wore white decorated with sparkles like her predecessor Elizabeth 1, on her Jubilee cruise down the Thames, gold to echo the gold statue of Queen Victoria at the Buckingham Palace Jubilee concert, shamrock green to go to Ireland, and a smashing pale primrose for her grandson’s wedding, each outfit beautifullly cut and tailored. And of course black with diamonds to Diana’s funeral. (I’ve wanted some fabulous diamonds to wear with black ever since) Her eyes are still as blue as when she was young and her complexion still as clear, though she’s lost her tiny waist and elegant legs in old age – haven’t we all?

But nothing much else has changed. She still walks her corgis every day and feeds them herself, cutting up their meat and dishing it out. She still rides her favourite horse, though not as energetically as she did, and still refuses to wear a hard hat, preferring her trademark  head-scarf.  She still breeds her racehorses and gundogs (black Labradors to you and me) and goes to the races. She still  adores her ninety-two year old husband. She still performs investitures and receives ambassadors, foreign sovereigns, dignitaries, heads of state and travels on Royal tours.

She still carries out between four and five hundred engagements a year; she still spends hours every day reading and signing all the documents in her red boxes, and she still receives her prime ministers every week for an audience to bring her up to date. Actually it’s usually the other way around. She’s so well informed that both Churchill and Wilson left discomfited after their first audiences, having assumed it would be a walk in the park, not a penetrating inquisition.

She’s had twelve prime ministers, and they all loved her – even Maggie Thatcher – and valued her support, knowing she was the one person who really wanted them to succeed for the country’s sake. Rab Butler, often described as the best prime minister England never had ( like the late Adlai Stevenson in the US ) often had audiences when he was acting prime minster.

No mean intellect himself, he was impressed by her intelligence, and also said that she never tried to behave as anything but a woman. He was fascinated by her constant anxiety over inflation as prices began to rise, saying it struck him as “inconsistent in someone who did not do her own shopping.”  But this was the frugal mother who sent her small son Charles back to the garden at Sandringham to look for a lost dogs lead – saying “ Leads cost money.” This was also the little girl whose nursery maid Bobo taught her to unwrinkle and fold the wrapping papers on Christmas presents, and re-use the paper and ribbons – in the depths of the Depression.

When she came to NZ for her 25 year Jubilee tour in 1977, a hard-boiled cynical anti -royalist was assigned to cover her visit to Auckland, the thinking being that there would be no sickly sycophantic reports. He came back to the office a shaken man. “I’ve just stood in the crowd as they walked up Queen Street and felt wave after wave of happiness,” he marvelled. He was amazed and mystified by the joy and excitement of the people overflowing the pavements on both sides.

On board the Royal Yacht Britannia I stationed myself at the end of the line of guests being received and was fascinated to watch the Queen. The first impression was one of innate shyness being overcome with a huge effort of will. She began shaking hands with a long line of people she would probably never see again in her life. As each person bowed or curtseyed, she gazed penetratingly at them, and followed them with her eyes as they moved on, before giving the next in line the same full attention. It was a simple act each time, but she gave it her total concentration. It made it a special moment for each person she met.

Later, as she circulated, chatting, and joined the group I was standing with, she was asked how she had enjoyed drinking kava, the Fijian fermented drink in a huge wooden bowl. She and the Duke had just come from Fiji. She laughed, and started to say: “Oh it tasted like” – when she stopped, remembered she could be reported and it would hurt the feelings of the Fijians, and ended mischievously – “like a nice cup of tea”.

Those who know her say she has a wicked sense of humour and is a brilliant mimic. Angela Kelly, who has become one of the people closest to her, says she’s very good at mimicking her Scouse accent. Nobody knows what books she reads, or what music she likes, and she hides her boredom at what must be excruciatingly boring banquets, lunches, receptions, concerts, parades, factory and hospital visits, and she never tries to be charming or popular.

She sees herself as the servant of her people, so along with presidents and prime ministers, she’s also had to entertain crooks and clowns – including the late and unlamented Romanian dictators, the Ceauscescus, who were preceded by a phone call from Paris where they’d been staying, warning that they’d steal everything, including the gold taps – and Berlusconi at a conference, who she ticked off when he was loudly showing off, asking why he had to make so much noise.

The one thing we do know is that she loves things to go wrong… and then the routine is disturbed, the pomp and ceremony are disrupted,  people become real, they stop being formal and become spontaneous, and she really enjoys herself!  She’s a countrywoman, who is happiest living in her country houses enjoying picnics and field sports (stalking deer, fishing, shooting and generally killing for fun) in the Highlands like all her ancestors before her; and riding and presiding over shooting parties (perish the thought) in Norfolk. She dotes on her grandchildren and is a devout churchgoer..

She’ll be 87 this year, and it’s hard to imagine a world without her… which was how people felt about her great- great- grandmother Victoria. Informed sources comment that she’s fitter than her mother was at this age, yet her mother lived to a hundred and four. So it looks as though she’ll probably outlive me, and I never will experience the world without her. God Save the Queen!

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

I read an article about sandwiches in the paper yesterday, and it had all my taste buds twitching. But to my mind all the mixtures and combinations people said were their favourites just didn’t compare with a simple egg sandwich. So while my husband chomped through his chicken salad for supper, I made myself the perfect egg sandwich.

It has to be fresh soggy white bread! Thinly sliced. Buttered right up to the edges so that the butter acts as an impermeable layer between filling and bread. Hard boil the eggs, chop and mash them up with salt and pepper and enough good bought mayonnaise to moisten them. Spread this mix over the bread, cut off the crusts and cut into four. (soak the crusts in water to give to the birds) Some people would add lettuce, but that’s a different sandwich – this is my comfort food, what we always ate on childhood picnics.

Food for Thought

Close your eyes and you will see the truth,

Be still and you will move forward on the tide of the spirit,

Be gentle and you will need no strength,

Be patient and you will achieve all things,

Be humble and you will remain entire.              Taoist meditation

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