Getting Ready For The Coronation -- February 18, 2023

I mentioned that I fell in love with Portland, OR, a week or so ago, and part of that experience had to do with Starbucks. See this post. 

It boggles the mind but people are willing to spend upwards of $10 for a cup of coffee ... 

... me, I refuse to spend more than $5.00 for a 10-cent-cup of coffee. LOL.

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Royalty

I finally finished that essay in current issue of The New Yorker.

From the essay:

When the King is at Sandringham, he sometimes invites [the 90-year-old] Glenconner over for dinner, sending a car to pick her up. She’d been at Sandringham not long before we met at Holkham Hall, and there had been talk of Lady Susan Hussey’s resignation. Lady Susan’s daughter, Lady Katherine Brooke, was recently appointed by Camilla as one of six Queen’s companions, a newly created designation for a modernizing monarchy: there will be no more ladies-in-waiting. [Very, very refreshing, by the way.]

There had also been discussion of King Charles’s coronation, which will take place in May, on a scale much reduced from that of Queen Elizabeth. There will reportedly be only two thousand guests, as opposed to the eight thousand who were at Westminster Abbey seventy years ago. Competition for seats at the Abbey is inevitable, with not every titled grandee guaranteed a spot. Glenconner said, “I think the dukes will all come, because they are part of the ceremony—they give their liege, or whatever it is. But I think the other peers and peeresses will have to ballot.”

As the mere eldest daughter of an earl, Glenconner is unlikely to make the cut if rank is the sole factor. But as a family friend—and especially as a rare living link to the coronation of 1953—she hopes to be invited. She is not taking any chances at being overlooked. “They have to be reminded,” she told me. “Which I did.” Finding herself next to King Charles, she had made full use of the opportunity. “I am going to be a bit cheeky now,” she informed His Majesty, putting in her request right then. Why ever not? There was nothing to be gained by waiting.

DeBrett's is the authority.

• the ranks of peerage:
• duke
• marquess
• earl
• viscount
• baron
• life peer
  

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Reminiscing

There was no time in my life that was "better" than my two years in England, specifically north Yorkshire. 

It was off and on for two years, 2002 - 2004, the longest stretch at a time, six weeks. I think about those weeks more than any other time in my life. 

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Also From "Getting Ready For The Coronation"

From "Lady in Waiting":

In “Whatever Next?,” Glenconner revisits her marriage, painting a fuller, and far less breezy, portrait of her late husband.

“He was often a wonderful companion, a beloved father,” she writes. “He was also an incredibly selfish, damaged, and occasionally dangerous man. . . . I lived with domestic violence and abuse for most of my marriage.”

From the start, her husband screamed at her, spit at her, shoved her, and threw things at her. He had numerous affairs with women, and once spiked her drink with what she suspects was LSD, in an attempt to loosen her up in the bedroom.

“How strange and typical of Colin that, rather than being tender, he decided he could just drug me into doing what he liked,” she writes. One day in the late seventies, in [on his private island] Mustique, he lost his temper and beat her savagely with a shark-vertebrae walking stick.

“I was utterly terrified, convinced he might actually kill me,” she says. The attack was never repeated, but thereafter she and Tennant lived ever more separate lives, though they remained married, fifty-four years in total.

For thirty-four of them, Glenconner herself had a married lover, whose wife knew of their arrangement and had a lover of her own. (Glenconner does not name her lover in her books, and has said that she never will.) “There was no question of any of us leaving our marriages,” she writes. “It simply wasn’t done.”

I love the Brits.  Harry will have a problem with Meghan.