Royal Jubilee Weekend

I guess you couldn’t help but notice ‘things’ going on over last weekend. For aficionado’s of regular shaped balls the World Cup started with France getting beaten by Senegal (don’t you just love it when things like that happen). For Royalist and Republican alike the shops made a killing out of selling Union Jacks and plastic bunting for the Queens Jubilee Romp. For anyone not turned on by either of those events there was three or four days of sailing at Bewl Water. Such diversity of choice at global, national and local levels !

On Sunday morning yours truly woke up, admittedly not too early, to highly organised chaos outside. Our road was officially closed at midday. Big yellow notices underlined the fact that no car could move in or out. So if you hadn’t escaped very early that was your hard luck! Houses rapidly became draped in heaps of Union

Jacks, bunting and balloons. Instead of car parking problems there were trestle table parking problems. Men wearing Union Jack bowler hats kept rushing about with chairs, tables and barbecues. Women wearing crowns kept appearing with, yes you guessed it, Union Jack table cloths, cups and plates.

At 10:30am it suddenly went very quiet. Nothing to do with the England vs. Sweden game of course ! At 12:30pm they started re-appearing, muttering, and looking far from happy. Apparently it had something to do with ‘almost’ winning. By early afternoon it all went mad again, except this time knee deep in rug rats.

I never realised our neighbours had so many children. It must be the water in Epsom, their all breeding like rabbits ! Lets face it there was no way that today’s ‘kids’ were going to dress up for traditional fancy dress competitions but if designer labels were anything to go by I reckon Nike won from Adidas and Reebok by several tee shirts. They did however all wear crowns, although several of them looked suspiciously like converted baseball caps. Strangely however they did all have a go at egg and spoon and three legged races.

Lyn and I bumped into Ann and John Neale, who live just up the way from us. Both sported the mandatory but very fetching Union Jack bowlers. Bottles/cans kept appearing out of houses and the afternoon passed very salubriously.

We left late afternoon, just as the Mayor arrived, and drove down to Kent to spend the rest of the Jubilee weekend with friends. We eventually ended up having a drink in the Mermaid Inn at Rye. I said to Lyn “this looks familiar”. She looked a little pained and said “you should, we spent our honeymoon here”. Oh come on guy’s, we’ve all done it ! haven’t we?

On the whole not a bad weekend. If nothing else the street party provided time for neighbours to talk to one another and make new friends instead of just nodding at one another while doing the weekly car wash. England opened their 2002 campaign in typical style but hopefully Sven or Posh will have a word with them and their performance will improve before it’s too late. I don’t know what happened to the guy’s at Bewl Water but I expect Richard will write something about it for the newsletter.

So that was the Jubilee weekend, I hope it was good for you. The next diversion will be the Queen’s Jubilee Picnic in Bushy Park on Tuesday 25 June. Aquarius has applied for display stand space at this bash. Keep those Union Jacks somewhere handy for this … and, just in case, Beckham’s brigade do the impossible and get to the quarter finals.

Mike (Red, White & not the least bit Blue) Baker