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Female, 69, married. Retired North-east England Jubilee blog Saturday, June 2, 2012 We had our Jubilee celebrations last night when the regular Friday meeting of our folk dance club was designated a Jubilee party, with guests from two neighbouring clubs invited to join us and to dress in red, white and blue. Most people, allowing for some pinkish and orangey interpretations of “red”, obliged. Dances called fitted the theme, such as Queen’s Jig and The Real Princess, and in the interval we had tea and cakes – queen cakes, decorated in red white and blue, and maids of honour. Perhaps I should write at the outset that I am 100pc monarchist and full of admiration for the way the Queen has tackled, for 60 years, a job she didn’t apply for and, apparently, didn’t want. When I look at the two-ring circus on the other side of the Atlantic as they approach yet another presidential election, I thank God we are spared the party politicking, rumour-mongering, mud-slinging and monetary finagling of a republic. Today was an ordinary Saturday. I’ve heard no mention of celebrations anywhere. In 1977 our road of 1920s semis joined the next road in organising a street party with bunting and games and tea but then a lot of us had small. Few of us have moved house so our children are up and away and, of course, no longer children. During the Golden Jubilee the Queen did a walkabout in our market place and a colleague and I nipped out of our nearby office to get a glimpse of this tiny figure in a daffodil yellow outfit. Today, as usual, we heard the first part of Sounds of the Sixties while lying in bed, with a first cup of tea, and the second part during a leisurely. During breakfast we made a start on the weekend papers, full of Jubilee celebrations elsewhere and of tributes to the Queen and assessments of her life. The post brought a letter from our daughter, 35 and living in West London. In spite of being a software engineer, she writes proper letters most weeks, with a fountain pen. Like many full time working couples, a long bank holiday weekend is a chance to catch up at home and she and her partner may decorate the kitchen. “Did you know”, she wrote, “That, in honour of the number of times Murdoch said ‘I can’t remember’ to Leveson, they’re calling it ‘the diamond j’oublie’ weekend?” Ouch. For complicated reasons connected with some fund-raising, we had to price plastic garden storage bunkers/sheds so drove across town to two large D-i-Y stores then drove to another part of town to buy bedding plants at a family-owned nursery. That’s a round trip of some six to eight miles, most of it through residential areas, and we saw only one house with any jubilee decorations. One car at the shopping park had union flags attached. The traffic and the people everywhere seemed no more and no less than on any ordinary Saturday. Cars at one used-car business we passed had red and white helium balloons attached. Earlier in the week, I’d looked for signs of celebration in the town centre and many of the shops had made some effort with either bunting or themed window displays. After a snack lunch, cold and on-and-off drizzly though it was, we did some necessary tidying up and potting on in the garden. While trimming shrubs in the front garden, I spoke to various neighbours. Most commented on the unseasonal weather or the fact that my opposite neighbours seem to have left their elderly cat to fend for herself while they are away (she’s been fed by other residents). None mentions the Jubilee. When we came in, it was to find that our central heating, whose thermostat in the hall stands at 15C winter and summer, had come on. Flaming June, indeed. Later, we watched the episode of Lewis we’d recorded earlier, so that we can skip the adverts, and also listened to Monday’s Radio 4 Extra episode of Beyond Our Ken, again recorded via our TV’s radio facility then read our respective books. One conversation: B “I’ve lost my place in this book, it was just after he’d been shot with a crossbow. Me “Is it a medieval mystery again?” B “No, it was just after the supermarket window had been blown out. How different from the home life…” I went to bed just before midnight and read for a time. I did switch on the midnight news on Radio 4, just to see if, in a family catch-phrase borrowed from a long-ago Carl Giles cartoon, we’d been “called up, sold up or blown up”. The jubilee was relegated to the third item in the opening headlines. Sunday, June 3. If one-more BBC member of staff says Westminstrabbey, I may become apoplectic, but even the Dean, in his sermon on the Radio 4 service, carried the “r” over. The continuity announcer, however, did things properly. It was, hooray, the old, familiar phrases of the Book of Common Prayer though, out of keeping, the lesson was not King James but a modern translation. I love choral music and the anthem by William Byrd was a cherry on the cake. For once, neither of us was on duty at parish communion so we gave ourselves a morning off. Another leisurely breakfast with the many-sectioned Sunday paper then I went to change the bed and the bathroom towels, while my husband washed up. We then made “proper” (not instant) coffee and I set up the laptop to start this blog. The telltale from the back garden weather station tells us it’s 8.8C outside. More like March than June. We’d intended to do what we usually do with major state occasions which is to put the TV set on, with the sound off, and just drop in and out of the room to see what’s doing, but we took our after-lunch cups of tea into the living room, to watch the muster for the pageant and stayed there all afternoon, apart from going out to wash up in some of the more inane interviews. TV personalities among the crowds made for ghastly false jollification for the cameras and it made the whole afternoon a bit tacky. I’d rather have had pre-pageant interviews with more of the people actually taking part slotted in, as those done on board, like that on the Tom Pudding, were interesting. More about the historic boats would have been interesting and better than what we were given. The whole pageant was such a wonderful sight, all those different craft, the colour of the costumes and the sheer ingenuity of putting a ring of bells on to a boat so that the pageant was headed by that most English of sounds, change ringing. The Gloriana was simply beautiful and the gold of the royal barge made me think of Shakespeare’s description of Cleopatra’s barge, except that the Queen didn’t sit in hers, not once in all that long, cold and wet afternoon. And, of course, as she didn’t sit down, nor could anyone else on board! A special sight for us was the LMS Stanier Pacific, Princess Elizabeth, standing on Battersea railway bridge to greet the craft. There were no politicians involved at all. Wonderful. I think that, sitting at home, we lost out on the atmosphere of actually being there but that was outweighed by being dry, warm and seeing much more of the pageant. We particularly appreciated the superb views of the bascules of Tower Bridge opening to their full extent I had wondered at the height of the water, knowing that there’s a rise and fall of 20ft or so in the Thames but not knowing the state of the tide at the time, but then it was explained that the Thames Barrier had been shut, maintaining the water level and cutting the speed of flow. Even so, rowing at 4mph for five miles is a fair test of anyone’s stamina, even in good weather. We had to leave the TV set at 5pm to go to get ready to attend the local Deanery jubilee service, so we left it recording the end of the pageant. The service was being held in the town centre church we attend anyway, as it’s the largest, but involved all denominations plus representative of other sects. Just ahead of us in the queue to get in were two senior members of our local synagogue. It’s a very long time since I queued to get into a church service but every seat was taken and rows of chairs filled the open space at the west end. The Lord Lieutenant and the High Sheriff, the noble lord who is patron of the living and the Mayor and Mayoress processed in, then came clergy from across the deanery as we sang the Old Hundredth. Other hymns were I vow to Thee, My Country, From Heaven You Came, Praise My Soul and Lord, For the Years. The choir was our church choir augmented by those who had volunteered to join in and this choir had been practising in the church hall all afternoon. They sang Parry’s I was Glad, Handel’s Zadok and, as on the Radio 4 service, Byrd’s anthem in honour of Elizabeth I; all the predictable war horses but nonetheless stirring, aided by a large choir and the acoustics of a 12th century church. The preacher, a suffragan bishop, took as his text the much-quoted promise of the then princess Elizabeth on her 21st birthday and speaks of the Queen’s life of service, linking into the value of individual service open to all of us. Back at home, we decided to look at Gary Barlow’s documentary on the jubilee song, thinking we’d probably switch it off as pop music isn’t our thing. How wrong we were. It was well produced and very interesting – and we liked the song, too. After that we caught up on the recording of the end of the pageant. Given the weather, the number of camera positions, the number of presenters and the problems of such a large-scale outside broadcast, the BBC technical staff deserve the highest praise. The odd loss of sound was a minor glitch. I did feel so sorry for the chamber choir, standing atop the Symphony and singing their hearts out as the rain drenched them. Professionalism of the highest order. Halfway through the evening our daughter rang up for an hour’s chat. She’d been to no jubilee events though she said houses in her part of West London had gone in for decorations. Today, we have watched more hours of television than we normally watch in a fortnight. Monday, June 4 Looking on the web site of our local morning paper, I could see reports of only two parties in our town and nothing about last night’s service. Perhaps the paper proper carried more. Looking at our own morning paper, the Daily Telegraph, we were amused to see the huge double-page spreads of photographs. Surely this was the Telegraph saying “because we can” to the tabloids, compacts and “Berliners”. Not surprisingly, this newspaper was solid praise for both the event and the royals. Bank holidays lose their relevance once you’re retired so, with no events we are aware of locally, it was a normal Monday, doing the washing, cleaning the kitchen and our bedroom and the bathroom. If I didn’t have a set routine for housework so that I can think “job done”, I’d never do any. After lunch, I wrote a letter to our daughter on a Word file and emailed it as an attachment. Normally I write a proper letter on Sunday evenings but there’s no post out until Wednesday this week. After the letter, I wrote up from notes yesterday’s blog entry. Next door has a decorator painting the outside wood work of their house so he’s obviously not celebrating. We’d looked at the line-up for the jubilee concert and decided there wasn’t one performer we’d go over the doorstep to see so we spent the evening reading, chatting and doing crosswords. I’d have preferred a concert featuring British composers as we have had a wide range over the centuries but I realise that would not play to popular culture. On the midnight radio news I heard that the Duke of Edinburgh was in hospital with a bladder infection. Put a 90 year old in the cold for hours, with no drinks and no lavatory breaks, and what do you expect? Tuesday. June 5. Daytime television again, but I did iron yesterday’s washing while watching the early part of the service at St Paul’s. To me, this service at St Paul’s was the real celebration of the Queen’s 60 years of dedicated service. I liked the dignity of the ceremony, the choral music, the expression of a faith I share. I felt so sorry for the young girl from the St John Ambulance who either lost her place or was overcome by nerves and had a long pause before she got started on her sentences. Maybe tomorrow’s paper will explain that. As these occasions are timed to the syllable, a long pause can be awkward. I also wondered, for the same reason, if the Archbishop of Canterbury would manage to add a reference to the Duke of Edinburgh in his sermon. He did. We also watched the carriage procession back to Buckingham Palace then set the recorder for the balcony appearance and flypast. As always on such occasions, I felt that, when it comes to pomp and ceremony, we can knock spots off anywhere else in the world. After lunch, I went to spend the afternoon with a friend of almost 50 years’ standing, It’s a 15-minute walk but I saw only four houses with any decoration. We discussed the BBC coverage of the pageant and agreed that it was tacky and that information on the historic boats and the Dunkirk little ships would have made much better fill-ins. On the way back, I stopped to chat to a friend who was working in her front garden. That’s someone else who felt the BBC was tacky, otherwise we talked about gardens and our respective, grown-up children. In the evening, we listened to the Goon Show on Radio 4 extra and read, breaking off at 9pm to watch the third part of Lucy Worsley’s documentary on 17th Century women. After that, we sorted through the mass of charity appeals we’d received in recent weeks (up to three a day), decided which to support and wrote the cheques before going to bed. We’ll watch the balcony appearance and flypast tomorrow evening.