A mixed bag of mild anti-royal and anti-Brexit stuff!

The dreadful, ongoing soap opera of the tiff in the Windsor household continues to dominate the news. So I thought I would include another royal family story that I came across in Hadley Freeman’s report of her interview with actor Brian, who claimed to have been “touched up” by Princess Margaret some fifty years ago:-

“I was at the Royal Court. I was doing a play with Alan Bates and it was my 23rd birthday and I’d been given a red shirt from Lindsay Anderson. I’d just washed my hair so I was sort of glistening, heh heh heh, and I walked in and was introduced to her.
She put her fingers on my shirt, and said: ‘This is a lovely shirt.’ And she started to run her fingers down the inside of my shirt. And I went: Uh oh! What do you do when you’re being touched up by a royal?”
“It was so funny. James Bolam, he could see what was going on and started going ‘Ooooh’ out of the side of his mouth, which somehow said princess didn’t take in at all. She just kept saying: ‘You were so wonderfully hooded on stage. I wanted to know more about you …’ She was an extraordinay creature. I excused myself and said: ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ and it came to a natural end.”

So perhaps it’s not just Prince Andrew!

There you go.

On the bus yesterday I was on the edge of a conversation with two old people. Yes, I know I could be included in the “old people” but these were older, or at any rate less mobile, than me. I was on the edge because I was not quite eavesdropping, but not quite fully participating, just occasionally joining in.

The gentleman was going on about his diabetes and how he doesn’t go out at night as he can’t see well enough, because of the diabetes. The lady just casually dropped into the conversation the fact that her two sisters and her brother all suffer from dementia. So what chance, she smilingly asked, does she have?

Oh boy!

Then this morning I found this article about looking after people with dementia, or rather not looking after people with dementia but exporting them. It seems that the care situation is so bad here that some people are taking their relatives to Thailand and putting them in dementia-care homes there. The care is apparently much better.

How did we get to that situation?

On the Brexit front, it seems that plans are afoot to have big celebrations on January 31st - possibly a commemorative coin, street parties and Big Ben ringing out. Churches are being urged to ring their bells too, I hear. This is being compared to the bells ringing out to celebrate the Allies victory in 1945. Really? I never knew we were at war with the EU!

A pro-Brexit businessman Lord Ashcroft is said to have offered to foot the £120,000 cost.

A Downing Street spokesman is supposed to have insisted that no final decisions have yet been made on how 31 January will be marked. Some in the Government are nervous about holding too many flashy events in case it alienates people who voted Remain.

Quite so! I could feel alienated.

When my mother organised a party in her garden for the Queen’s Jubilee, we did not go. My mother understood. Besides she had plenty of other people attending. I don’t think anyone told the queen.

When Charles married Diana, we went to a friend’s ‘stuff the wedding” party, where we all studiously did not watch the wedding or talk about it. I doubt that anyone told the queen about that either.

So on January 31st, I want no flag-waving close to my house, thank you!