Though NASA was unable recently to revisit the Moon, you will see from above my good self at my Lunar Chateau relaxing in the Var in Southern Provence, three miles from the Med for the first time in three years. My wife and I first stayed on this site in a hired caravan, thirty five years ago with our then 15- year-old son .
Some ten years ago my long-suffering spouse, who had bought the Chateau on our retirement, had towed it from London to Dover and onto a boat, and driven it from Calais, diagonally to South- East France, about 800 miles. We used spend the months of May and September, avoiding the hottest weather here. Or perhaps one of those months there and the other anywhere from Kerry to St Petersburg. Sweet are the uses of retirement, particularly if a man has a chauffeuse
As it happens we were here when news came of the Accession of King Charles lll of England. And I heard on the radio some of his fulsome tribute to his late mater.
Forty-one years ago we were camping in France where we had fled to avoid he brouhaha of Charles’s wedding to Diana, and I believe his vows to his naive young bride were no less sincere than his tribute to his very lately departing Mum.
I doubt somehow that Charles would be amused if the lately departed were to return like a latter-day Cincinnatus to reclaim the Crown and Sceptre.
Then republican France watched the nuptials on TV. Whether it has the stomach to watch a fortnight of synthetic mourning and listen to intelligent commentators prostitute themselves to swear that a privileged billionaire who had a Groom of the Stool to wipe her backside and swear that it smelt of roses, was polymath, a concert pianist,, trapeze artist and stand-up comedian, I don’t know.
I remember drinking a pint in the Public Bar in the Royal! Hotel in Howth in late 1960 when there was a stampede of women heading for the Lounge to watch the wedding of Princess Margaret and Anthony Armstrong-Jones on the BBC News on a small black and white box. It was not transmitted live.
The women were all veteran republicans, imprisoned hunger-strikers in the 1922-1923 Civil War, coming from a Fianna Fail Cumann meeting. A wedding is a wedding and in those days political women had no hang-ups about gender.
Anyhow In France in 1981 I met Kelvin Hopkin and his family. Kelvin I think was a researcher with NALGO, the National Association of Local Government Officers. I was wearing a James Connolly badge, which he recognised immediately, for his own father was a professor and communist. Kelvin was later Labour MP for Luton North part of a socialst leavening of that party, and his daughter Rachel, who was a teenager then carries the baton there today.
I can’t read omens but I do know that Keir Starmer, a Knight of the Bath shares a distinction with Benito Mussolini who was dubbed by King George V in 1923 and remained so honoured until June 1940.
And I know that when Keir Hardie proposed in 1912 that common soldiers should not be deployed in strike-breaking against trade unionists, he got no backing from his party and a contemptuous editorial in THE TIMES.
When Lancer Officers on their high horses at the Curragh led refusenik officers refusing to confront other Unionists, that was a horse of a different Colour.
Normal Service will resume presently.
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