Functions Begin «

Functions Begin

Sunday 19th February 2023

Last week to Kew for the Orchid Reception in the Princess of Wales Conservatory: strange arrangement of guests threaded on paths through exotic greenery, luxury winter flowering exotics and arcs of orchids imported specially as a winter attraction. The Head of Kew addressed the throng from high up in the rain forest apparently. Later he spoke privately to me, Adrian Edge, about the cost of heating the Princess of Wales conservatory. Devastating. The Palm House is next – £25 million or some such required for restoration. The designer of the orchids was more plant than human; even his hair was green. Otherwise we had: the Head of Wisley, the Head of the Physic Garden, the BBC Science correspondent who spoke well of the King having interviewed him re: climate change. We had RHS luminaries. A Princess dropped her phone down a grille and a team came to heave up the grille with special equipment and retrieve it. It turned out she’d given £20,000. So had her friend. Finally we had the Leader of Richmond Council. Leaving we wanted toilet and tried to piss Kew but a guard barked, ‘Stay on the path.’ So we had to piss Kew Green instead.

On Friday Royston toured me at Westminster Abbey. The idea was to get close to the forthcoming Coronation. The Abbey is so small, although the tallest nave in England. On TV it looks huge but it isn’t. Then there’s all the clutter of monuments and tombs, an extraordinary clamour of persons demanding to be remembered, crammed in any old how, many of them due for cancellation unfortunately. Expect to see Archbishop Welby with hammer and chisel bashing tablets off the wall any day soon. Lucky he was previously an oil exec so has a practical side.

What’s incredible are the tombs of the medieval monarchs – such as Richard 1, Edward 111 and Henry V. I always thought these people were in plays by Shakespeare or as poems by Eleanor Farjeon. But if they’ve got tombs they must have existed. Quite a thought. I don’t think Welby will be able to get rid of any of them.

The Abbey was comforting. Somehow there will always be a monarchy with all those slabs. Queen Elizabeth 1’s tomb quite immovable.

What about the Henry V11 Chapel? Could hardly believe it. All these years this raging extravagance of devotion and Tudor aggrandisement has been there. But hardly ever have I visited.

Perhaps that’s a measure of its rarity. To go all the time would be wrong somehow.

We went up into the new galleries in the roof. Wren put a floor in there. In 2012 a new staircase and housing were added to allow public access. This building has lived and lived. Magical display of the Abbey plate and the original altar front as well as replica Crown Jewels used for Coronation Rehearsals.

I tried to tell Royston that my grandparents were saved by their choice of the Abbey over the Guards Chapel for service the Sunday morning the bomb fell on the latter killing nearly everybody there. Had they veered differently who knows how our destiny would have fallen. Also in the 1940s, the Gay Mother saw in the Abbey at morning service Her Late Majesty Queen Mary and the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, with his daughter. Royston was unimpressed. He has sat with all the Royal Family in the Abbey as a special guest for the Commonwealth Day Service. Random encounters at normal Matins are as nothing.

I mentioned that maybe the Koh-i-noor should be returned to India. Certainly not, Royston boomed. In the garden of the abbey were some of the best crocuses I have ever seen, not flattened by rain this year as they almost always are.

The Coronation Chair, Partly Dismantled for Restoration Owing to the Forthcoming Coronation. I Thought the Stand underneath New but it isn’t. Royston wants Queen Mary 11’s Coronation Chair used for Queen Camilla but his Suggestion has not so far been taken Up. Not quite Sure how you Sit in this Chair – those Animals would be in the Way?