No one wants to be around a woman who feels badly about herself. Who would I bless by being too tired or overweight to tend to my duties? What message would I be sending to my children? How effectively could I witness to the culture if I dragged my disheveled self around here, there and everywhere? And how would my husband feel if I never made an effort to dress up a bit for him? (Read More)Share
by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks. Another marvelous selection from the BlogHer Book Club, it vividly describes life in Puritan New England from the point of view of a young minister's daughter. My review is HERE.
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No plant should be introduced to the lawn-and-garden world until its backers are certain it won't become a noxious pest. Plant companies didn't always do that in the past. But the vast majority of imported plants are well-behaved. They have been enjoyed by homeowners and landscapers for decades, if not hundreds of years, without causing problems.Share
is a heart-wrenching, coming-of-age story about a young girl striving to better herself in spite of life in a modern sweat shop. My review is HERE.
King George VI: If I'm King, where's my power? Can I form a government? Can I levy a tax, declare a war? No! And yet I am the seat of all authority. Why? Because the nation believes that when I speak, I speak for them. But I can't speak. ~from The King's Speech (2010)I finally saw The King's Speech
, the Academy-award winning film about King George VI's struggle to overcome a debilitating stammer. The perfect follow-up to the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, it features the famous London landmarks shown in the wedding footage as they were in the 1930's. Although the film is about famous royal figures, the battle to overcome an infirmity is an experience which knows no rank. A troubled childhood can scar the psyche no matter what the social background might be. Likewise, the courage and humility to seek healing confer nobility upon highborn and lowborn alike. In this case, a fragile man of royal birth is aided by the friendship and understanding of a mentor to become the strong and courageous leader he is called upon to be.
And here's the lovely part about making peace with a loved one's belongings: While so many of us are drawn to the new and perfect, inherited pieces have soul. Even if flawed, objects and furnishings with history have a story. They carry the energy of our affection. It radiates through the house. People can sense it when they walk through the door. We may not be conscious of it, but it's there.Share
For one glorious, uplifting, joyful day it was as if the everyday world had been faded out from the video screen and another picture altogether had taken its place.
Gone were the things that grind us down, terrify us, bore us rigid or turn us off altogether. The economic crisis, war, voting reform, venal politicians and their idiotic name-calling, the endless litany of official incompetence, the vulgarity and ugliness of TV voyeurism and binge-drinking, the habitual cynicism and grey-faced indifference of the public in the face of all this: it all vanished from view....
Instead, there was quite simply an explosion of public joy at the wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton. Britain beamed, cheered, laughed, gasped, threw its collective hat into the air and choked with emotion. And this was not merely generous-minded delight at the happiness of the new Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. It was an eruption of feeling that some would have had us believe had vanished for ever: a profound affection and support for the monarchy — and for the Britain that it embodies.
For me, as I’m sure for many others, what brought a lump to the throat was not just the poignant spectacle of Prince William, the casualty of the breakdown of his parents’ marriage, receiving his radiant bride in the very place where as a teenager he had stood by his mother’s coffin.
It was also the roar of approval that went up from the huge crowds outside Westminster Abbey when he and his bride uttered the words ‘I will'. It was the enormous cheer for the Queen as she stepped out of her car at the Abbey door. And it was the full-throated singing of the National Anthem by the throng that stretched down the Mall. Some would have us believe that it is all over for the monarchy. They paint it as the anachronistic, class-ridden and discredited residue of a country that must shed its history, traditions and very identity in the interests of multiculturalism, diversity and equality.
Last Friday showed up this claim for the unpleasant piece of wish-fulfilment that it is. For the reported million or so who turned out to line the streets, and the many millions more gulping with emotion over their TV screens, were not some ideological fantasy of social engineering but the real people of Britain. And they want what the British people have always wanted: a monarchy that reflects a collective image of themselves and of their country that they can admire.
That includes characteristics they yearn for (although maybe cannot always achieve): a happy family life, stoicism in the face of adversity, courage and selflessness, duty and sobriety, and the sense of sharing in a worthy collective national project. Only the monarchy, standing as it does above and beyond politics, can sustain this benign projection of national aspiration.....
...Last Friday, people in this apparently godless nation were held spellbound by a wedding ceremony which was explicitly not just religious but Christian. What was even more notable was the special prayer composed by the happy couple themselves. For in this they prayed for help to focus on the important things in life, to serve and to help the needy — all ‘in the spirit of Jesus’. This was in effect an explicit dedication of themselves to a life of service to the nation on behalf of the Christian institution of the monarchy. (Read More)
He was an official guest of the Deep State of Pakistan. They’ve been scamming us for billions of dollars for years pretending to help us chase Osama Bin Laden while they’ve been sheltering him in their equivalent of West Point, Annapolis, and Colorado Springs rolled into one. Maybe the elected leaders didn’t know, or didn’t want to know because they might end up as dead as Benazir Bhutto.Share
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| The Duke of Wellington |
, as follows:A recent post on the noble and edifying Tea at Trianon mentioned Catholic emancipation in England. A remarkable rôle was played by the Iron Duke, the Duke of Wellington, a Protestant of the Protestants who was Prime Minister. He was a real hero in England as he had been at Waterloo.Do we take heed of heroes any more? When I was head master of a boys’ school I used to ask boys at interview who was their hero or heroine. Often there was a long pause: saints were frequently mentioned, sometimes a boy’s father or mother which was impressive but never the Iron Duke. Yet this was a man who ought to be revered by all Catholics. Born in Dublin of a Protestant family, Wellington acquired the anti-Catholic prejudices of his time. Yet his nobility and respect for others, especially his fighting men, made him the Prime Minister to grant Catholic emancipation and he was to fight a duel with an extreme Protestant who thought this was a concession to Rome too far. Before this, he had shown remarkable respect for Catholic beliefs. When Wellington was Commander in Chief of the British forces in Spain and Portugal, he gave orders that whenever a priest in the streets was carrying the Blessed Sacrament, British soldiers were to stand to attention and present arms. Thus this Dublin Protestant showed more respect than does many a Catholic today.
He had to endure obloquy for his granting of Catholic emancipation. His reasons were not theoretical ones but practical gratitude: he thought it an injustice that the Irishmen who had fought so bravely and well in the Peninsula and at Waterloo should not be allowed to worship God in their own way. Again, he could give many modern Catholics a lesson about the meaning of the word “justice”. About a third of his army was Catholic, recruited in Ireland and Scotland. In 1829, Wellington challenged to a duel a letter writer in The Standard, Lord Winchilsea, who had berated him for his papist leanings because of his support for Catholic Emancipation. Lord Winchilsea said that the Duke’s support for King’s College, London (being set up to counteract University College, the Godless institute in Gower Street) would make that college Catholic. The duel took place on Battersea Fields, and Wellington’s shot grazed the arm of his antagonist who shot into the ground, probably terrified of killing the Prime Minister and hero of Waterloo. What a more manly way duelling seems of settling quarrels than using spin doctors or paying expensive libel lawyers!
Wellington and Napoleon are portrayed well in a fine book Napoleon and Wellington
Wellington spoke of Napoleon with respect, “I should rather hear of the French having 40,000 extra men that that he were to command their forces” – and actually protected him in June and July 1815, as a chapter of Roberts’s book makes clear. Napoleon gave no honour to Wellington except when he was trying to save his skin. On the morning of the battle of Waterloo at Le Caillou farmhouse, Napoleon said to General Soult: “Because you have been beaten by Wellington, you consider him a great general. And now I tell you that Wellington is a bad general, that the English are bad troops, and ce sera l’affaire d’un déjeuner.” As another great English hero, Churchill, might have said, “Some affaire, some déjeuner!” Roberts then shows a final piece of infamy from Napoleon, in his will: he left 10,000 franks to a M. Cantillon, a crazed Frenchman who had tried to assassinate Wellington.Wellington maintained his sense of humour as is shown in the following from a dispatch that Wellington sent in 1812, responding to a demand from the bureaucratic War Office in Whitehall, London, for a full inventory:
Each item and every farthing has been accounted for, with two regrettable exceptions for which I crave your indulgence. Unfortunately, the sum of 1s 9d remains unaccounted for in one battalion’s petty cash and there has been a hideous confusion as to the number of jars of raspberry jam issued to one cavalry regiment during a sandstorm in Western Spain. This reprehensible carelessness may be related to the pressure of the circumstances since we are at war with France a fact which may come as a bit of a surprise to you gentlemen in Whitehall.King George IV’s Queen, Caroline, was not all that she should have been and the King was about to divorce her for her infidelities but she was pretty and the crowds liked her. She was a kind of Princess Diana figure of her day. A London mob, rioting in favor of Queen Caroline, stopped Wellington’s coach and asked him if he supported Queen Caroline; the Duke replied, "Well, gentlemen, since you will have it so - 'God save the Queen!' - and may all your wives resemble her."
Teachers, might like to take Wellington as a caution against writing boys, or girls, off at an early age. At Sandhurst, where British Army Officers are trained, there used to be a framed document asking the reader to read that side first: on it there was a school report of a boy described as lazy, stupid and feckless who would never make anything. When one turns the document over, over all is explained: “that was written at Eton about Arthur Wellesley, subsequently Duke of Wellington, commander in Chief of the forces against Napoleon, hero of Waterloo, Prime Minister of Britain, Chancellor of Oxford University etc, etc.” Wellington, like Churchill, did not do much at school.
The last paragraph of Roberts’s bookis a sad and chilling one as he comments on the present day.
Napoleon’s programme, of a politically united Europe controlled by a centralized (French-led) bureaucracy, of careers open to talent and of a written body of laws, has defeated Wellington’s assumptions of British sovereign independence, class distinctions and the supremacy of English common law based upon established, sometimes ancient, precedent. ‘I wished to found a European system, a European code of laws, a European judiciary,’ wrote Napoleon on St Helena. ‘There would be one people in Europe.’ There is some irony in the fact that Waterloo was fought a mere twelve miles from Brussels, the capital of today’s European Union. For, although Wellington won the battle, it is Napoleon’s dream that is coming true.
ShareWe gave them an inch and they have taken a kilometre.
Tourists to London can visit Apsley House, Hyde Park Corner, Wellington’s house and now a national museum under the jurisdiction of the Victoria & Albert Museum. As well as many items of Wellingtonian memorabilia, there is a marvellous art collection. Grateful Spaniards gave their liberator pictures by the local lads such as Velasquez, Murillo and Goya who painted the Duke himself. When shall we see his like again?
