Windsor Castle is an amazing place, and one day I will go and look around it when I am not wearing heels.
We saw the really truly bullet which killed Lord Nelson, and the original Holbein picture of Queen Elizabeth the First when she was a girl. I have seen this many times in books, but to see the real one was just a delight.
There were hundreds of wonderful, enormous pictures, lots of diamond-studded swords and Henry the Eighth’s hunting sword, and lots of young men dressed in armour and plumed hats, there were beefeaters and Gurkhas, and men in properly splendid tailcoats and overcoats. There were chandeliers and suits of armour, marble statues and gloriously ornate vases, and I don’t mind telling you that I wandered around with my mouth open, gazing and gaping and marvelling at everything. Prince Andrew jolly well went up in my estimation for saving so much of it when it all caught fire, he deserves to be let off for whatever other rascalliness he has been caught doing, because the place is full of magnificent treasures that it would have been terrible to lose.
The whole family came with us to the gates. My dad had a motorised scooter, just to make sure his legs didn’t give way at the last minute, which might have happened even though the hotel is just across the road, and he tootled inside very nicely. We waved goodbye to everybody else then, and they all buzzed off to explore Windsor, and a very nice chap with a motorised buggy came buzzing down the hill to pick us up.
This was because of my dad’s legs, although secretly I was grateful because of the heels, and also the hat, which makes it quite difficult to see the whole world. I don’t envy the Queen, how awful to have to tip your head right back whenever an interesting bird flies past.
There were people everywhere, all dressed in smart tidy clothes and smiling. They all kept congratulating Number One Daughter, and telling her how well she had done, and helpfully escorting everybody in the right direction. It was a good job they were there, because it is a huge place, and I could quite cheerfully have wandered off to poke around along some of the interesting looking corridors, although they weren’t really corridors. Every one was a series of magnificent arches. Indeed, everything everywhere was magnificent, event the chairs for sitting and waiting were gold, although probably it wasn’t real gold but just paint, even in a castle there must be limits.
We waited in a huge room until it was time to go in, and a chap in a tail coat came and told us how to behave, but we were no wiser even then, because the room was so huge and echoing that we couldn’t hear a word. Number One Daughter had been summoned to the front to listen, and she explained, so that was all right. We had to go in a few at a time, and stand and watch whilst your Chosen One got their award for being Most Excellent, which is what it says in the programme, you are a Most Excellent Member of the British Empire, although we all agreed afterwards that Number Two Daughter is pretty good as well, and then they took dozens and dozens of photographs.
It wasn’t the King in the end, it was Prince William, and he is very tall. I mean, really tall. He towered over Number One Daughter like a prep school headmaster with a virtuously prizewinning child at Speech Day, and she had to tip her head right back to see him, because of course she had her Army hat on, and it has a peak at the front, which makes it difficult to see upwards.
He is also really thin, which just goes to show that photographs must really make you look fatter than you are, because he doesn’t look thin in the newspapers. He wasn’t wearing a crown, or anything, perhaps he hasn’t got one yet, although you would think the Welsh would have let him have one by now. Anyway, he smiled and talked, and waved his hands about a lot for ages, and Number One Daughter told us afterwards that he had been talking about the PT Corps.
Then suddenly it was over, and we were outside waiting for the buggy to turn up, and everybody was waiting for us at the gates. It took all morning.
We went back to the hotel and tore off all evidence of middle classness, which was necessary by then because even in the street people kept coming up to Number One Daughter and asking if they could have their photographs taken with her, and I have to say it was lovely to be back in shorts.
The rest of the day drifted past in a blur of eating and drinking far too much. We have just waddled back up the stairs to our very nice bedroom, and I have got such shocking indigestion that I think probably I need to go to sleep now.
I will be very glad indeed to go back to our quiet life of walking on the fells and eating porridge.
All the same, it has been Most Excellent.
