New kid on the block

You might have heard that the line of succession to the British crown has been extended; the Duchess of Cambridge gave birth to a boy on Monday & the world press has behaved like it’s nothing short of the Second Coming.

Well, maybe a teeny bit short. But they've really been making complete plonkers of themselves, no doubt about it.

So I’m not going to rehash all of that. I’m just going to tell you how I’m connected to the event.

You’ll recall that my friend Marcia is a change-ringer, & that a while ago she rang at Windsor Castle on the occasion of a state visit from Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi, the president of the United Arab Emirates.

Yesterday Marcia was expecting to devote the day to supervising the installation of a shed in her garden, but at 2200 on Monday she got a call From The Castle (or, you know, someone repping the Castle) asking if she’d come ring in the afternoon to officially mark the Royal Birth. (Which is a hashtag that has been trending on all the social media. In case you’ve been in a cave without even dial-up connectivity.)

So, despite the nasty heatwave Britain has been experiencing (elsewhere in the world that would be known as “summer”, but the Brits are unused to that sort of thing), she showed up in that grody little ringing chamber & rang for 30 minutes.

(There was a full peal in the tower of Westminster Abbey, which went on for three hours. Well, maybe not a “full” peal—some of those suckers can go on for nine hours. But it was still long enough to wear out some of the listeners outside the Abbey. The ringers in the hot, badly-ventilated ringing chamber must have been wrung out.)

Dunno whether she & her comrades got paid the same cheap £4 they received the last time they were there. HM certainly does not understand the concept of laborers being worthy of their hire.

You’d have thought that at least she’d splash out on a bit of bubbly. She must have a large enough collection of the stuff down in the Castle’s cellar.