As a lazy, half-hearted republican, I naturally wouldn't be caught paying to get into Buckingham Palace. But we all have lapses. Sometimes it is useful to gain an insight into the lives of royalty ("seeing how the enemy lives" would overstate the intensity of my feelings).
You can easily gain that insight in France, too, without needing still to have the royalty. But the French went too far in choosing how to rid themselves of theirs; I'd just take away the wealth and privilege and put them to work in humdrum jobs.
The tour of the State Rooms is actually reasonable value at £19.25 a head, for old codgers, when compared with the rip-off prices at London Zoo, for example. The art collection is magnificent, with useful itemised descriptions on the free audio contraption, and the glimpses of royal childhoods are fascinating, as is the accompanying screening of old newsreel.
All seems well organised, the wait to file past interesting exhibits is of bearable length and the staff are smiling and helfpul. Outside is the sort of back garden we'd all quite like, expanses of immaculate lawn, sturdy old trees and a beautiful man-made lake with water from the Serpentine.
I had been inside the Palace professionally on two, long-ago occasions. Once was to report on the first opening to the public in 1993, to help pay for repairs to Windsor Castle after the fire of the previous year. Before that, I'd been for a briefing by officials on the visit of the Prince of Wales and Diana, then his princess, and - as it happens - me to the Gulf in 1986.
There is, inevitably, a shop that is difficult to avoid as people near the end of their visits. But the proceeds go towards the upkeep of the Royal Collection, as much public treasury as private possession.
Two observations:
* I am sure the Palace-branded Pauillac is, as described, "spectacular", but at £40 a bottle it wants* to be for most pockets. If they can do a Bordeaux white at £20, it must be possible to hit the same price range for reds. My French brother-in-law might then have been able to toast the Queen, or regret the loss of his, this Christmas.
* the "Windsor Castle" coffee chocolates were delicious and, less than 24 hours later, are gone.
From one's garden to one's own park, or so it sometimes seems. It's at the end of the street, just a few doors up in fact, and yesterday was its day to host the Brentford Festival, a jolly event with bands on an open-air stage, children's attractions galore and all the other familiar trappings of the village fete.
They even managed to assemble these relics of non-royal means of getting around London, with a Heathrow-bound jet on its final descent up above ...
* My ever-reliable remote sub-editor, Dumdad (visit his own blog at http://theothersideofparis.wordpress.com/) was left scratching his head at this phrase, or perhaps just the use of the verb "to want", but he'd have heard it a lot if he hadn't moved away from the north so young. To be read, in context: "as it flaming well ought to be at that price."
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