Meanwhile, down the hill from wedding chapel ...
I’M AMONG millions of people who didn’t get an invitation to Harry and Meghan’s Windsor wedding. I watched on tele and tried to ignore that American preacher.
Over the years, I have been to Windsor many times. It is a very elegant town about half an hour’s drive west of Hampton Court Palace and well worth a “looking at posh castles” day trip.
My major involvement with Windsor was from playing cricket against Windsor and Eton cricket club. I played club cricket donkey’s years ago for a club called Laleham, another Thames-side suburb near Windsor and one of its best club sides. Eton adjoins Windsor and is the home of the very posh Eton College.
As of October 2016 Great Britain has had 54 prime ministers of whom 19 were educated at Eton College. They probably also learned to tolerate Brown Windsor soup. This soup is made traditionally from lamb or beef stew with a healthy serving of even healthier stewed vegetables. It is not quite as bad as it sounds and it used to be extremely popular with British Railways whose dinner menus were always dominated by it. I nevertheless doubt that it was on Harry and Meghan’s wedding reception menus.
Windsor has a main street with many excellent cafes and a hill steep enough to test your resolve to visit them .... I think the choice of St George’s Chapel Windsor for the Royal Wedding was spot-on and plenty big enough to cope with serious wedding watchers. Incidentally, Royal Weddings seem to have a depressingly regular habit of being followed by Royal Divorces.
This probably has more to do with the choice of partner rather than the choice of wedding venue. It is nevertheless a great disappointment for those of us who subscribe to the “Until Death Do Us Part” view of such things. Oooops! I am letting personal prejudice cloud my judgement. Lots of my favourite people have been divorced and most of them had very sound reasons why that was a good course of action at the time.
My wife and I have been married since Adam was a boy so we have at least given it a fair trial. Of course, you have to be lucky in the decisions you made in those dim, distant days before Sir Alf Ramsey led England to a World Cup victory. As I ventured to explain in one of these columns only about two months ago, my wife and I were married in 1963, right in the middle of Lent, much against the wishes of our local Anglican Parish priest.
He didn’t believe that the solemnity of Lent should be put at risk by a couple who seemed to enjoy each other’s company. Mind you, he got his revenge on us for our sinfulness. We had a four day honeymoon marked for me by three days of constant vomiting in a very expensive Bristol hotel before returning to our Birmingham home........ It was a long time ago but the memories remain vivid.
I actually spent most of last Saturday remembering and writing this particular contribution to your Wednesday reading and the memory of my wife dining alone as I concentrated on my particular vomitology! I am pleased to report that this has not been a characteristic of our subsequent married life. We have even subsequently returned to our honeymoon paradise without any gut consequences.
My life has been remarkably free of attending other peoples’ marriage ceremonies although I did do the Best Man duty at my brother’s ceremony. Its highlight, strongly denied by him, was his declaration to me on the way to the church that his piles were troubling him and threatened to spoil later events!
I have no idea whether his concerns were justified...