Friday, April 29, 2011
This very royal day
As a lapsed republican, I am moved to comment on today's royal list, prompted by the omission of two of our dearly beloved former prime ministers. Off to the Guardian which thoughtfully provides a downloadable spreadsheet of the 281 invitees which were on the list released by the Lord Chamberlain. The Guardian seem to have left the 7 Spencers off their version - sloppy editing - but it is still possible that this is essentially the dinner list for this evening, as, according the horse's mouth (http://www.officialroyalwedding2011.org/), of the 1900 people invited to the Abbey, 600 get to have lunch with HRH the Queen and 300 get to have dinner with HRH the Prince. They don't say whether the two lots overlap at all.
According again to the Guardian, the two most recent prime ministers (Labour) were omitted and the two before that (Conservative) were included because the Prince does not like lefties, his idea of what constitutes a lefty clearly being very inclusive, and Prime Minister Cameron thought it would be cool to go along with the Prince. Not very constitutional at all to my mind.
And then the leader of that country so tied up with our history, Taoiseach Enda Kenny, seems to be missing. As does any representative of our gallant ally, the United States. But the bosses of Gibraltar, St. Helena and the Falklands are in with their partners. As are the Beckhams. Mrs. is clearly a master of string pulling if not dressing.
Closer home, becoming something of an expert on hawthorn flowers. Horton Lane has lots of pure white, great swathes of the stuff. A much smaller amount touched with pink. So where is all the pink stuff that Proust runs on about? On the way home came across a rather scrawny, red hawthorn tree down Longmead Road - some sort of unhealthy garden version - and a few more down my own road. The pink flowers were doubles and while florid from a distance, nothing like as pretty close up as the singles. And then this afternoon we finally come across a pink hawthorn in Nonsuch Park with single flowers, like the white ones only a delicate, graded pink. Much better.
And on nettle flowers. All the nettles seem to be in flower at the moment. Plenty of regular nettles down Longmead Road with their rather dowdy flowers, but broken up with scattered clumps of the much smaller white dead nettles. Plus some of the very small purples. And elsewhere, the odd clump of the very pretty yellow nettles, these last much the same size as white dead nettles. At least I think these last are nettles; they have a nettle like appearance and habit. They also grow at the bottom of our garden.
PS: a lot of starlings about this morning, not something I see much of, although they were very common when I was young in Cambridge. And a possible sighting of a gold finch in the form of a flash of red, green and yellow in a tail. But whatever it was, it declined to sit still where I could see it and study it properly.
# posted by Jim @ 8:09 AM 
