Z is for Zoo

So at last the A-Z blogging challenge is over. It seemed like a good idea at the time but in practice it collided with some busy working weeks, meaning I'd find myself tired and clueless in a quiet room late at night. A bit like now, really.

It's not always easy finding a word that links the appropriate letter to something you really want to blog about. There were mental blogging blocks, for instance P if for Privet, is kind of desperate; O is for Oblocutor is somewhat weird and D is for Druids is plain obscure.

But overall it was fun and like that long distance hike or marathon run we are relieved when it's over but once we have caught our breath and wiped the dust from our feet we miss it; we miss the camaraderie of fellow sufferers and the new friends you made along the way.

So after 25 blogs of painstaking original content, I think it's now how time to cheat and use a re-post (of sorts) on the last post which is probably the literary equivalent of slogging 25 miles of a marathon until the finish line is in sight and then hopping on a friend's motorbike and speeding over the line, to be promptly disqualified.

Having never run a marathon, I wouldn't know, but I ran a half marathon once. And I am totally not bitter about that 72-year-old woman who sped past me in the last 100 yards. How did I know she was 72? Hit men require certain biographical details these days.

But seriously zoo isn't totally a re-post because Trail of the Tiger has finally opened at Virginia Zoo in Norfolk; as opposed to the last time when we acted on misinformation and spent a day admiring scaffolding.

Now the new exhibition has opened we face a new dilemma, namely whether to go back again to the zoo and face the heat and crowds and the maximum number of child strops that can be fit into a closely confined space with animals, or to nobly pretend the zoo no longer exists.

My 2009 post was really about how zoos seem like such fun in principle; until you actually visit them and realize you have paid $10 a piece to stare at elephant dung and gray backside 100 yards away.

So here goes...

I’m not sure if ‘zoo’ is Latin for: “place where miserable children traipse around in the vain hope of seeing animals in hibernation.” If it isn't it should be.


Curiously, whenever we suggest going to Virginia Zoo in Norfolk, I feel an initial bout of enthusiasm, which may explain why we’ve been there about four times in the last two years.

Last Sunday we went to the zoo for Zara because we feared she would feel left out by all the attention being lavished on Jackson less than a week after he was born.

The first time we took her there she was two-years-old and had to be pushed around in her pink Princess stroller. Our hopes she would take an interest in the animals was dashed at the first stop off, the hairy black pig in the barnyard enclosure. It probably has a proper name but, for all intents and purposes it's a hairy, black porker.

After the pig no show we gamely upped the ante, introducing her to camels, lions and finally giraffes and elephants, all to no avail. Our daughter remained listless and disinterested.

In contrast on Sunday Zara was raring to go, talking incessantly about seeing her favorite animal the zebra, because it began with ‘Z’.

Unfortunately, getting my wife out of the house and on the road at the best of times, can be about as smooth and coordinated as the relief effort post Hurricane Katrina.

With a new born baby in tow, I should have started packing the car a week earlier.

We got on the road by 4 p.m., resisting all calls to return for forgotten items.

After speeding through Norfolk we barely made it to the zoo before the announcements that the place was about to close, were sounding out.

So our zoo experience, once again, was a whirlwind tour of animals that gamely failed to present themselves on demand.

At least you can rely on the black pig. He was right on cue, sunning himself and raising his trotters in the air in a foul smelling salute to his audience. Zara was interested, this time and we strided enthuiastically on to see a big old Yorkshire pig, magnificantly obese and puffed up as as befits the largest county in England.

My wife pointed out most of the swine at the zoo were from England. It had never occured to me when I lived there that I inhabited a center of pig excellence.

Things went downhill from then on. We needed water and the Beastro was closed. Nor did the handily-placed drinks machines that dispensed water at $2 a time work.

We proceeded to the nocturnal house, which Jackson should have honorary membership of, but didn't see many of the snakes and reptiles because of the mass of kids crowding around the tanks.

By the time we got to a monkey display, the phalanx of unruly kids had grown into a bristling army that marched on fizzy drinks and Little Debbies. There seems to be an informal rule at the zoo that as soon as someone pulls a camera out to take a picture, this is a cue for a couple of people to stand between lens and subject and not to move until the sun goes down. Or maybe that's just what happens when I take a picture.

We walked on past Trail of the Tiger, a half constructed maze of faux Oriental temples that is due to open at some undetermined time in 2010. Probably December 31. It started me wondering what happens to the tigers during the construction period. Does a flyer go up in the zoo cafeteria asking for volunteers willing to let a tiger sleep on their couch for six months?

The interactive praire dog habitat with viewing bubbles seemed more promising. Zara and myself took turns looking out of the bubbles to see gray mud. We persevered with more bubbles because there was a group of people behind a nearby fence pointing in our direction, leading us to assume praire dogs had been sighted.

My wife later informed us they were pointing and laughing at the stupid people who had missed the signs and were looking through the bubbles for praire dogs still in hibernation.

With the zoo announcements picking up the urgency of an woman who had clearly skimped on lunch and was manically fiddling with her keys, we headed as quickly as it is possible for a family with a five-year-old and a baby stroller up to the optimistically named Okavango Delta.

The real one is the world's largest inland delta in Botswana. The one at Virginia Zoo comprises plastic cliffs and a bit of grassland and water. I've seen worse attempts but frankly you'd have to drink sherry all day to think this resembles the real thing.

At this point Zara threw one of those Catch 22 child strops that are so hard to deal with. She wanted to climb onto the aluminium rhino but didn't because it was too high and screamed at all attempts to be hoisted up there. But when we abandoned the rhino to press on, she screamed that she wanted to go on the rhino.

The climb up the Okavango Delta display wasn't promising; the meercats and a number of less interesting animals were hibernating. Even the fennic fox that can normally be relied on to pose for the cameras had gone AWOL.

There was no sign of the zebras and the elephants and giraffes had forsaken the delights of the delta for their concrete bunkers but at least they could still be viewed.

Only the lions were gamely gathered for the visitors but, by this time Zara was so disconsolate about the rhino setback, she had no interest in seeing them.

The last 15 minutes were a race to the gate to avert the prospect of spending the night at Virginia Zoo.

I hope not to return any time soon. Virginia Zoo is a pleasant enough place compared to the bleak animal jails that masqueraded as zoos when I was growing up in Britain.

But it lacks something. More specifically it lacks penguins. Surely no zoo is worth its salt without feeding time at the penguin pool. 
 
In fact as we increasingly fall into the listlessness of middle age, when the highs become lower and the lows become business as usual, increasingly I urge disaffected friends and colleagues; think penguins and you will have a wide and idiotic smile on your face in no time at all.
 
And if the A to Z challenge has taught us one great truism it's this - we all need a personal penguin to help us get through the day.

Y is for Yesterday

Yesterday by the Beatles has apparently had more cover versions than any other song. It’s also one of the most melancholy songs produced by the band.


The suggestion of “all my troubles seemed so far away” points to a golden age when thing were better. Ironically Paul McCartney wrote it when the Beatles were in their heyday.

It was credited to Lennon/McCartney, although the song was written solely by McCartney. In 2002 McCartney apparently asked Yoko Ono if she would allow reversing the credit on the song to read "McCartney/Lennon". Ono refused.

The remaining Beatles would perhaps see the aptness of the song today. Lennon was shot dead 30 years ago, George Harrison has died of cancer, McCartney’s wife died and he’s divorced from that dreadful woman with one leg, after parting with $24 million in the process.

And Ringo Starr is, well Ringo Starr. But at least he narrated Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends.

As a concept Yesterday seems to convey the idea that everything used to be better. But that’s not always the case. Few people who watched today’s Royal wedding can have looked back to the 1981 wedding between Charles and Diana, and thought that was better, although it was quite a spectacle at the time.

Certainly Kate did not appear to be looking around at the seats to see where a potential mistress was sitting as Diana was in 1981.

But there certainly may be days when Wills and Kate will look back to todays’ wedding as a high point and a day when their troubles seemed so far away.

Ordinarily I don’t hold with rose colored spectacles though and I have little time for people who tell me: “When I grew up we left our doors unlocked. There was no crime. You didn’t have to keep an eye on your kids etc.”

I always feel like asking them if the “good old days” are the ones when the skies were full of German bombers and death camps were being built across Europe. Or are they referring to the trenches, or the days of Victorian poverty when Jack the Ripper slit his victims open on the streets of Whitechapel.

And even if Wills and Kate’s marriage went wobbly it couldn’t possibly end as badly as the 1533 marriage of King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.

The marriage ceremony was secret but the coronation of Queen Anne saw the Queen dressed in a cloth of gold with ornate barges following her for four miles down the Thames.

In 1536 the Queen parted company with her head.

We may like to hold onto those sepia memories but the further back you go the more unpleasant a place yesterday seems to be.

X is for Xylophone

I almost forgot about ‘X’ which would have been rather tragic so close to the end of the A-Z challenge.

Fact is there aren’t many words beginning with ‘X’ and I’m not sure if X-rated counts. But if you pick up a dictionary there are actually more than you think. Talking of which I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Daft Scots Lass for her recent award to Brits in the USA.

Some unusual words beginning with X are xanathareel and xanthic, but people would start looking at me in a strange way if I substituted xanthic for yellow or indeed xanthomic for yellow haired.

I like xanthippe, though. It means ill tempered woman; conceivably you could call an ill tempered woman a xanthippe and escape without being slapped.

Being boring and traditional I will go with xylophone, though. For one thing it sums up the bunker of aspirations that was my fleeting musical career.

At elementary school I harbored dreams of being a musician. I saw the older kids with their shiny trumpets and bugles and felt jealous. Instead we blew listlessly into recorders, which are surely the most uninspiring musical instruments known to humanity.

My manual dexterity was never good. To get to the shiny instruments we had to pass the recorder test. I fumbled and failed and faced the shame of walking to school for two years with recorder in my duffle bag, accompanied by my neighbor with his shiny bugle.

My parents were somewhat relived at my failure as they didn’t have to fork out more than $150 for a brass instrument.

The pinnacle of my musical career took place around the age of 11 when I got to bang a triangle a couple of times in the school play. Mozart eat your heart out.

By the time I went to high school, my musical aspirations had all but drained away.

The music teacher Mr. H, piqued our interest for a couple of lessons by educating us on Dance Macabre before lapsing into his real character – as a lazy, frizzy haired good for nothing.

So for the next x-years music lessons became 40 minutes of undisciplined banging of xylophones and cheaply manufactured Glockenspiels in which the metal notes jumped from their rubber awnings when you hit them.

It would have been more rewarding to hit Mr. H, but he was usually too busy hitting on 15-year-old girls to notice.

Indeed this frizzy haired disgrace to the education system who seemed to believe he was the Bee Gee that got away with his mobile disco, flared pants and 12 inch versions of Soft Cell’s Tainted Love, was the talk of the school and the parents, although nobody seemed to complain in those days.

Frequently Mr. H would turn up at an after school disco holding hands with a girl who had left school a week earlier. The rumors of illicit liaisons in the lecture theater swept the school.

“f… &*%%##@@@@,” one of the physical education teachers said in the earshot of a group of 15-year-old and for one hopeful moment, I thought he was going to punch Mr. H in his hamster chops.

I don’t know what happened to Mr. H in the end but I know xylophones in the wrong hands can make a lot of discordant noise but very little music.

W is for Wedding

W is something of a non brainer given all the publicity currently being given to the Royal wedding on Friday.

During the Joy Behar show Larry King was asked about Will and Kate’s nuptuals and the old cadaver quipped back, asking her if a nuclear crisis was still going on in Japan, what about the war in Libya, Colonel Gaddafi etc., didn’t America have a revolution hundreds of years ago to escape from the infernal Royals?

Perhaps someone needs to tell the U.S. TV networks that it’s not a wedding of the American Royal Family.  The closest America gets to Royalty seems to be Donald Trump, judging by the amount of airtime he's getting.

In saying that you can’t really blame the U.S. networks for going big on this one as fairytale weddings don’t come along very often and usually the fairytale doesn’t last long anyway. To give Will and Kate their due, they have already tried the breaking up thing and still want to go through with this.

So the Royal wedding is a distraction from the ongoing torment in Japan and Libya with Syria next. It’s a nice feelgood story featuring two fairly young and presentable people.

My personal beef is the fact that the U.S. news networks seldom cover other news from Britain or elsewhere in the world unless there’s a cataclysm. Last year’s British General Election that led to the first hung Parliament in decades was historic, but didn’t get much air time over here.

And goings-on in countries such as France, Germany and Italy hardly get any air time unless it’s a murder trial featuring an American national, such as the Amanda Knox murder trial in Italy.

Despite my complaints I may well get up at 4 a.m. to watch the Royal wedding for a while. For a start I still have to drown those queasy memories of the last Royal Wedding between Charles and Camilla in 2005.

Hopefully this time most of the hoofs will belong to the horses in the wedding procession.

Kate and Will’s wedding bears the more obvious comparison with that of Charles and Diana in 1981.

When it comes to Royal weddings, it seems we are all unreconstructed lookists.

V is for Vermeer

Jan Vermeer is one of my favorite painters because of his devotion to perfection.

Records on the Dutch master who lived from 1632 to 1675 are scant and there's no indication he left his native town of Delft, which appears to be one of those sleepy Dutch towns of weeping willows, verges choked with tulips and mellow church towers that shimmer under the big skies of the flat lands.

There's no evidence that Vermeer did the typical painter things like chopping off the occasional ear and falling into fits of depression, rage and debauchery but we really don't know much about him.

Rather he quietly enjoyed the light and created some of the finest masterpieces known to the history of art, albeit in an economical way. Only 40 of his works have come to light.

"The secret of Vermeer's craftsmanship may be found in a remark by Michelangelo, who said that little things or trifles, done to perfection, build up into great things or art," Thomas Craven wrote in the Readers Digest Treasury of Great Painters.

The Little Street by Vermeer is one of only two landscapes that have come to light. It was apparently the view from his house and typifies a sleepy Dutch backwater back in the 17th century.

I picked up a postcard of this painting after a somewhat heavy night in Amsterdam with some friends years ago and found myself yearning to explore some quiet streets in the weak sunlight.

U is for Underground

The morning of July 7, 2005 seemed like any other on the London Underground, the rickety subway system, that implausibly keeps the city going. There were delays but they didn’t seem anything out of the ordinary.


I was only 10 minutes late to my office at the Palace of Westminster. But my colleague David was considerably later than normal. By the time he arrived an hour late he was complaining about inexplicable delays from St. Albans.

Shortly afterwards an item appeared on the TVs that were permanently on a news channel about an explosion caused by a power surge in the underground.

I was immediately suspicious. Ever since September 11, 2001, death had taken place in the morning, normally on a clear blue day, whether bombs in Istanbul or the Madrid train bombings on the morning of March 11, 2004.

Implausibly we went to a Department of Health briefing on dentistry. But it was cut short half way through by the serious events elsewhere. By now we knew something was badly wrong. Talking teeth in the middle of a terror attack, seemed perverse.

By the time we returned to the House of Commons the usual entrance was blocked off and a special security entrance had been set up. The policeman on the entrance was talking freely about “bombs on the underground.”

It took us 30 minutes to get back to the office by now it had became clear that something terrible was going on. Three bombs had gone off on trains. Knowing the hot confinement of the morning commute underground it was impossible to comprehend the horror. Then TV started to beam pictures of a bus that had been blown apart at Tavistock Square. For one haunting day as the wounded emerged from the tunnels, London resembled Baghdad or Kabul, revealing how thin the veneer between war and peace can be.

Still we sat in the Commons through the emergency statements, although some of us walked or cycled up through the rain to Kings Cross where the walking wounded were still coming out of the tunnels.

Just like 9/11 we all remember what we were doing on 7/7, the day the Underground lost the innocence it had when I first boarded it as an excited child and picked up my first copy of the iconic Tube map, decades earlier.

The next day a mood of foreboding swept over me as I boarded a District line train and looked suspiciously at the passengers around me. And as I read about Britain’s home grown suicide bombers in the Times, an eerie feeling washed over me.

The face staring at me from the paper was that of Mohammad Sidique Khan, a classroom assistant from Leeds who was the leader of the suicide bombers. It freaked me out because it was so familiar. It freaked me out because it was from the interview I did with him as a freelancer on the Times Educational Supplement a year or so earlier.

I found myself wishing I had paid him more attention, even though he was only the secondary interviewee. I found myself wishing I hadn’t erased over the tape.

T is for Teacher

Sometimes people ask me if I regret giving up teaching after a couple of months.

I normally answer them with an unequivocal 'no'

I admit I resisted the urge to erase a photograph of my airless, lightless dungeon classroom from my cell phone for more than a year. You could make out the chipped desks, just not the giant penis that G. had drawn on his desk in indelible marker that I would shield from the head of department by standing in front of it during classroom inspections.

Much has happened at the school since I left and my brief presence there is probably forgotten by most. The head of department and number of other English teachers have departed. And the coach - the only guy the most unruly students seemed to be genuinely frightened of, for fear of being dropped from the team - has departed under something of a cloud after he was arrested for sex with a 16-year-old.

Maybe every six months or so I will check the faces on the school website. Invariably the website will be out of date, with the exception of the coach whose face was removed as efficiently as Trotsky was airbrushed out of the snapshots of the Russian revolution.

I still shudder at certain names and faces on the website, remembering terse emails and requests for acts of petty bureaucracy.

When I thought of teaching I always thought of some of the inspiring orations at assemblies when I was a student. But when I became a teacher we never had assemblies with the exception of a special discipline event in which the principal spent the best part of an hour barking out all the different ways students could get in trouble including the dress code.

I am aware now I failed in my end of the bargain. When a female student turned up in a skirt that appeared to be too short, I failed to get out a tape measure to check her out and send her to the office. It just didn't seem right; when a guy showed up in what appeared to be a gang T-shirt I failed to get into a discussion about whether this really was a gang or maybe a rap star or maybe (more confusingly) a rap star who resorted to gang lyrics. I simply turned a blind eye, which is not the done thing in teaching.

I still see some of my students occasionally. I gave H. a half smile but she was too busy shoplifting at Wal-Mart to notice, I swear that was R. who served me at McDonald's last week. I considered saying: "If you had studied Lady Macbeth's Act I soliloquy And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty more you have made it to Arby's." I resisted the urge.

Recently I was doing a wine tasting when I saw the principal walking my way. Cue to don a funny hat and moustache and to do a swift 180 and to stare intently at bottles of Cupcake. The funny thing is I doubt if she would have remembered my anyhow.

But there are certain faces that bring back good memories too. I find myself concluding school would have been a lot more fun if not for the students. My teaching career was going swimmingly until the day the kids arrived.

So now I am left with a truck load of materials that I payed thousands of dollars for that I don't know what to do with. I tried to use a few in my occasional stints as a tutor but families tended to pay me not to show up.

My friend who lasted less than two weeks at a high school near here said had a bonfire with them the day they let her out.

But I can't bring myself to part with them so easily, thinking I might need them one day.

Just like I might need the miniature Portuguese sword that my father bought me back from a trip to the Algarve.

But at least I have a new found appreciation for teachers and I certainly don't begrudge them a couple of months vacation.

I am posting this early because I am going away to the mountains for the weekend, thus taking the closest thing to a blogging break one can take during the A-Z challenge.

S is for Suits You

Let's face it; there are so many possibilities with 's' that writing a blog about the Suits You duo is like picking up the best letter and hurling it in the sea - which is another good 's.'

There is sand and sea and shells and Shelley and sleep (which sounds like a good idea), not to mention the Smiths and smells and shopping and Sears and why someone should sink Sears into a subterranean sinkhole of slurry.

Not to mention sarcasm, the lowest but paradoxically the highest form of humor.

Talking of humor Ken and Kenneth from the BBC's Fast Show were two characters who spawned a million impersonations and ensured we could never walk into a man's suit store again without a smirk.

The sketch succeeded because the store reminded us of so many dated men's apparel stores that we have been in before, formal and in something of a time warp with that canned, tinkling music.

The store assistants are middle aged, impeccibly dressed and overly formal.

Except in the case of Ken and Kenneth they also turn out to be utter perverts who would unleash a tirade of filthy suggestions, seemingly unable to contain themselves. The obvious discomfort of the reserved customers, makes the sketch successful.

I can never watch the Fast Show without thinking of Trevor, a former colleague, who lived and breathed these characters. You'd be minding your business in work when he'd jump up from behind a desk and hit you with an "Oooooo Sir."

The Fast Show was apparently aired in the US where it was called Brilliant. It's most famous fan is Johnny Depp who appeared with the Kenneths in a sketch in The Last Fast Show Ever.

The worst thing about this sketch was it was very difficult to resist uttering the words "suits you Sir" whenever I found myself in a tailors thereafter.

I still bear the mental scars from the glares of the shop assistants.

R is for Ruins

Once I was walking in the Black Mountains of Wales and rounded a conical hill to come upon a lush green valley. There nestled in the hills were the ruins of an old medieval priory, seemingly forgotten by time and wrapped up in the greeness and the morning mist and the verdant silence of the hills.

I have always been fascinated by ruins. For me a ruined castle is far more romantic than an inhabited and well maintained palace like Windsor Castle because it seems to be a metaphor for the struggle we will always lose against nature.

That ruined monastery was Llanthony Priory and it remains one of my favorite spots.

But if ruins chart the time of man on the earth a Medieval priory only scratches the surface. A number of places vie for being the oldest ruins on earth but some of those are found in Mesopatamia, now an arid and war torn land that is modern Iraq.

The land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers is known as the "cradle of civilization" because cities appeared here as long ago as 5300 years before Christ. The Sumerian civilization not only built stone cities but was one of the first to produce writing and to condify laws.

The Great Zigurat of Ur was built in the 21st Century BC and has survived fairly intact, not least being near the site of a battle in 2003 when American troops invaded Iraq.

Like so many other ancient civilizations the glories of Sumer and later Babylon and Assyria were in contrast to the modern day nations of the Middle East, plagued in recent years by poverty, hopelessness and  tyrants like Saddam and Gaddafi.

Of all the ancient civilizations Greece is one of the most interesting, not least because it invented modern day concepts of democracy and philosophy.

The ruins of Delphi high in the moutains are among the most evocative. Here at a temple the spirit of Apollo was asked for advice through the Pythia, a priestess.

The Roman civilization has left numerous ruins. Those at Pompeii are among the most fascinating because of the tragedy that hit the city in 79 AD when it was destroyed by lava and ash from the volcano Vesuvius.

The ruins in Tulum, Mexico are much more recent, dating from AD 564 but their breathtaking position abovea white beach on the coast put them on my must visit list.

So too are the massive ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, a massive Khmer temple built in the early 12th century and now partly reclaimed by a jungle of creepers and vines.

Unfortunately these ruins are firmly on the wish list. My reality has been dark and brooding castles and abbeys on the moors.

Carreg Cennen Castle in Wales is one of my favorite ruins, given its spectacular position on a high hill overlooking the sweeping Welsh countryside. The castle has a history of intrigue and "Merlin's Cave" underneath the castle can still be explored.

Tintern Abbey on the English border close to Wales is one of the country's most famous ruins. It was painted by Turner and inspired the poet William Wordworth imore than 200 years ago in an era when ruins came to be romanticised to the point that landowners built false ruins known as "follies" in their grounds.

In Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth wrote.

Five years have past; five summers, with the length

Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a sweet inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
Which on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

Q is for Queen

Not many things have remained constant in my life. My parents haved moved from the house where they used to live and recently moved again.

I often find it difficult to answer when people ask me where I'm from.

But as the world speeds by leaving us in its slipstream, as mobile phones become BlackBerries and then iPhones, the Queen of England remains an unchanging relic of yesteryear like an old gramaphone in the corner of the room that remains because it's an institution.

Who would have thought that in 1977 when God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols was released to coincide with the Silver Jubilee of Elizabeth II, the Queen would still be going strong more than 30 years later while the Sex Pistols were long forgotten with their creator Malcolm McLaren dead?

The most remarkable aspect of Queen Elizabeth is the fact that in all this time on the throne she has changed so little with the times. Her voice could be straight out of a black and white movie from the 1950s and her wardrobe is timeless.

In many ways Elizabeth was an accidental monarch. When her uncle Edward VIII took over the throne in 1936, few considered her an heir. But Edward got himself mixed up with an American (it happens to us all) and the rest is history.

After Edward abdicated, Liz's father George became George VI. Elizabeth fell in love with Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark in 1939. The date is somewhat alarming because she was only 13. They married in 1947. The union was somewhat controversial because Philip was foreign born and had little financial standing. Elizabeth's mother apparently initially referred to him as "the Hun."

Philip even had Nazi links through his sisters and while nobody has pinned Hitler loving sympathies on him as they did the Queen's uncle Edward, Philip managed to spent the next five decades developing a stellar reputation for telling tactless racist jokes and putting his foot firmly in his over sized mouth.

In contrast Elizabeth, who was crowned Queen in 1952, succeeded in being inscruitable and totally controlled for the much of the rest of the century. It's a well know fact that the Queen has blue blood and doesn't partake in low bodily functions like the rest of us.

Elizabeth's coronation in Westminster Abbey is the stuff of folklore; one family in the whole street would have a black and white TV and everybody would be in their home, drinking tea and cheering Her Majesty through the snowscreen that was the early days of television.

This tale is so hackneyed it could be completely wrong. For all I know it may have been a mass riot.

By the Silver Jubilee in 1977 we all had TVs. I can remember the cheap plastic Union Jack hats and all the street parties with jelly and crisps. We had crown making competitions in school and the whole nation seemed to love HRH, aside from the Sex Pistols.

By the time of the Queen's Golden jubilee in 2002, so much seemed to have changed. For an article I walked the streets of Ilford in East London tracking down the people who held street parties in 1977. There were few street parties in 2002. Most of the organizers had moved away. One couple took me conspiratorially into their home and told me how the neighborhood was unrecognizable from 25 years ago.

Most of the homes were now occupied by people from the Indian subcontinent who had no appreciation of the monarchy and no national pride, they told me, not to mention a new influx from Eastern Europe.

Also much had happened in the intervening time to the Queen herself as fissures appeared in the once seamless Victorian facade of the Royal Family. The Queen described 1992 as her "annus horribilis." It says much about the Monarch herself that she could use such an expression, one most people would equate with an anal infection, in a formal oration.

In 1992 the Queen saw the divorce of her daughter Princess Anne and Captain Mark Philips and the separation of Prince Andrew and Sarah Duchess of York.  The chances of a reconciliation had been scuppered by pictures in which the Duchess, known as Fergie, by the tabloids, was getting her toes right Royally sucked by her financial advisor.

Worse was to come. The marriage between the Queen's eldest son Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales, was also falling apart as Charles became involved in equine pursuits and Diana got involved in a questionable relationship with a chap with red hair who reminds me a bit of...

It says much about the Queen that the fire at Windsor Castle seemed to upset her more than the relationship failures of her children.

But the one event that seemed to affect the public the most was the death of Diana in a car crash in Paris in 1997. As a huge un-British outpouring of grief swept the nation, the Queen remained holed up at Balmoral in Scotland and wouldn't even fly the Buckingham Palace flag at half mast for a few days.

The Queen's subsequent capitulation was captured in the movie The Queen, which blamed Philip for much of the Diana fiasco.

As an aside the whole Diana business failed to move me. I always saw her as something of a glammed up clothes horse who'd jump on good causes to milk publicity. But strangely enough I recently saw a documentary that made me rethink my past cynicism. She really seemed to care too much and make too many unglamorous visits for this to be a massive publicity stunt, even if much of it may have been to fill a void in herself.

So what are we to make of the Queen in 2011 as she approaches her diamond jubilee next year? She seems like a relic of a Britain of the 1950s, when there was a white face in every house and women swept the floors wearing rollers. She seems firmly rooted in the last century, if not the one before that, while William and Kate espouse a new more multicultural Britain.

But while the Queen doesn't command the loyalty of her subjects that she did decades ago, who have been wondering for some time why they contribute to much money for her to go hunting in Balmoral and to keep somany Corgis, you have to admire her resilience.

She outlasted Sid Vicious and McLaren and she's still going strong while Brit Pop is a fading memory. Margaret Thatcher once spoke about going on and on until her vision was recognized but there's a younger generation out there who have never heard of her any more than they have heard of Duran Duran.

In contrast the Queen has seen 12 Prime Ministers come and go starting with Winston Churchill. And she's still going strong.

P is for Privet

The first friend I ever had was also my strangest friend. And, believe me there's lots of competition.

Walking round the condos tonight with my daughter, playing our favorite game of counting frogs, I realized that America doesn't have many privet hedges.

While England's suburbia comprises swathes of green and iron gates set in hedges, America has white picket fences.

Back where I grew up in suburban Birmingham we didn't have much. Our flying saucers were old tires and my play car was an old iron bath my grandfather had put wheels on, much to the consternation of an elderly neighbor who had the bruises to testify to the weight of the thing.

But heck - we were rich in privet hedges back then.

That's how I met Gregory Spencer; I came out of my house one day and saw his torso sticking out of the hedge, his face buried among the tiny leaves.

At first I was annoyed. Brits are taught to be territorial about their privet hedges from an early age.

He withdrew his head, looking rather startled and told me he was eating the hedge. Would I like to do lunch?

I tried a few of the bitter leaves but they weren't entirely to my taste.

"Tell you what," I told him. "There's a big old Mountain Ash tree in the garden. Maybe you'd like to partake.'

I don't think I actually said partake. I didn't know that word then. Still the tree was my absolute favorite. We'd climb it and jump into the neighbor's garden, ostensibly to piss her off.

The boy, who identified himself as Gregory Spencer started to salivate as soon as he saw the tree. In no time at all we were stripping bark off it with our teeth and devouring the trunk.

In hindsight I wondered why my parents didn't stop us. But come to think of it my parents didn't stop us doing much. For instance all of our holiday pictures from Spain feature me wearing a bucket on my head. I was convinced it was as cool as hell and I looked like a Knight of the Round Table, whereas in fact I looked like a dorky kid with a bucket on his head.

Any rate Gregory became my first firm friend and we'd hang out in the woods and do the sort of things kids do, mainly eating tree bark and hedges.

Eventally as all great childhood friendships do, ours soured. Those leaves ceased to be so succulent. It may have been the time Gregory got his hand caught in the chain of my bicycle.

Or perhaps it was the time my mother disparaged Greg's chain smoking, hard nosed mother and I told him: "My Mum says your Mum's a cow."

Unfortunately Greg relayed this information to his mother and I was called into a Spanish inquisition like forum in his living room, complete with comfy cushions, to be asked: "Did your mum call me a cow?"

Strangely enough my memory of these distant days behind the hedges of suburbia are fleeting like the sun slipping in and out clouds. Some are vivid and others are obscured. I can't even remember the answer I gave to Gregory's mother, although our friendship didn't last.

Still it's funny to recall those days and good to invite my blog friends into my privet world.