My majesty

Last Saturday was the queens official birthday, trooping of the colour. It’s the one day a year that I am not in favour of a republic. So much so, that during the airforce fly past I’m not only glad to have a royal family, I would like to be the queen. I’ve seen the film Kind Hearts and Coronets and I’m not sure how many posh people would have to die for me to get the job, lots possibly, potentially all. Whatever, let’s just skim over that for now as I do want to stand on the balcony of Buck House as the Red Arrows fly down The Mall…..just for me.

I know it’s never going to happen, obviously.

I love planes, I love old planes more, the sound of a propeller plane can reduce me to tears. Spitfires! Just the thought is making me teary.

Mr T served in the army during WW2, in the Royal Engineers, an airborne division. He spent a lot of his service time as crew in a Hamilcar. I’ve inherited his love of all things aeronautical but without the urge to actually fly and most definitely without his urge to parachute, anywhere, let alone into enemy territory. Mad bastard.

For the last three years I’ve worked Saturdays in the East End. The planes fly over London Fields on their way to The Mall. So that’s where I go to see them. This year I convinced my students to come with me. Let’s have lunch I said, it’ll be exciting I said. We went to a pub with a beer garden that overlooks the park and serves food, I ordered a burger. The burger was really very good. It came with a steak knife and somehow, in amongst the chatting and the watching out for airplanes, I stabbed myself in the face with the pointy end. I knew I’d done it and that it hurt but I ignored it…… until I saw the blood on my face, in the mirror when I went to the toilets! WTF? It looks like I cut myself badly while shaving my upper lip. FFS! For the sake of clarity, I don’t need to shave.

To add insult to injury most of the planes must have taken another route, we only saw a handful. I had to find film of an earlier fly past to convince my students that I hadn’t made up the spectacular possibilities of our lunch time outing. Anyway we all enjoyed our lunches and the upside is that pub lunches may now become a regular component of the course. I think we should add it to the prospectus.

Frenchie is very concerned, I’m her only sister and her least weird sibling. I think she fears I might be in a self destruct mode, what with throwing myself to the floor last week, followed by the stabbing incident, followed by, and I think she’s going over the top now, sheltering under a tree in a storm. People die under trees in lightning strikes you know, she said.

Oscar Wilde said that true friends stab you in the front, I’d like to know what he’d have to say about last Saturday’s incident.