Queen Elizabeth Jubilee Celebrations...

 

Enjoyed watching the celebrations in London. Queen Elizabeth is certainly a marvelous woman and so respected by so many in the commonwealth and around the world.

The platinum jubilee celebrations went perfectly and as always, as only Britain can do it, just like clockwork. It's certainly all in the timing, precision and organisation. A colourful spectacle indeed. Many try; they don't always succeed.

Have to admit it pulled at the heart strings for me as it's where I grew up, spent my formative years as they say. So many memories, good ones, some not so good, happy and sad. I wished my Parents were still alive to witness the celebrations as London was a great part of their life..it was their life. Through the war years and the bombing of London and everything that went with it. Certainly there was sadness and tears but they survived, as the British did at the time, against all odds.

I watched it on TV eagerly trying to spot landmarks I knew so well.

Loved the show outside of Buckingham Palace. It was just great. Stars I knew and some I didn't but it all went off seemingly without a hitch and all live. If that was somewhere else, another country,  the music would all be pre recorded and mimed to; in some cases quite badly as we have seen.

Great weather as well. Just imagine if it had been raining it would have all looked so different.

As I have said Queen Elizabeth is an amazing woman but I do wonder in the future what will happen?

Will Charles ever become King and will Camilla ever be accepted as ..surely not.. a Queen? Or will it go directly to William? Guess we shall see when that inevitable day comes, as it will, as it must. 

We don't like to think or even talk about that yet although we know the Queen cannot live forever. 

One thing that kept coming back to me was Princess Diana. The peoples princess as she was known seems to have been forgotten. Was she just there to produce  "an heir and a spare" as was said at the time; when Charles truly loved someone else. And as Diana stated there were three in that marriage and that made it difficult.,,impossible!

Was there ever true love there from Charles or was it all just show to promote "The Firm" as it is known; the royal family? This was also suggested at the time.

There was a time when Diana died people turned against the royal family for their lack of compassion when her death was announced. August 31 1997 at the young age of 36.

Millions of flowers were laid at the gates of her home by a shocked and saddened public, Kensington Palace, as a way to say thank you and goodbye. Her funeral was the most watched TV event in history, 

The general pubic were angry with the Queen for not issuing a public statement about her late former  daughter in law and her unwillingness to leave Balmoral Castle in Scotland where she and Prince Philip were on holiday. It came across to many as uncaring and quite callous. A newspaper headline at the time "SHOW US YOU CARE" said it truthfully and very bluntly. The Prime Minister Tony Blair suggested she should return to London and to lower the flag on Buckingham Palace to half mast. Something they  reluctantly did.

How quickly we forget and forgive it seems.

Although Diana was...to put it bluntly and not meaning cruelly... just a "blip on the radar" of the seventy year reign of the Queen it was indeed a "blip" that could have almost, at the time, done great damage to the institution of the royals.

So as she lay seemingly forgotten, buried on a small island in the middle of a lake on the estate of her childhood home Althorp in Northamptonshire, I think of the Queen and thank her for her life of duty...and I also remember Princess Diana. The Peoples Princess. The most famous, most photographed, woman in the world at the time who was really not accepted by the "so called" establishment but outshone them all in more ways than could ever be imagined and was widely accepted by the world.

RIP Diana I remember you...