One of my first memories is that of watching the Coronation next door, at Mrs Needham’s with my brother and two sisters, and Mummie and Daddie, experiencing television for the first time. I remember flickering images on a small screen of parades, and numerous renditions of God Save the Queen, my introduction to a lifetime’s joy from music. I don’t recall being particularly enamoured with the silly nursery rhymes my mother would serenade with as a toddler, but being amused decades later, during the era of political correctness when Baa baa Black Sheep was rewritten as Baa Baa Sheep!
Between then and now, I attended primary school, private grammar school, was employed for all except for around six weeks, between 1966 and 2017 with five different employers, had a heart attack, and am now contentedly retired. My father, at his retirement party during the inevitable speech stated that he had enjoyed his life, citing a few “watersheds.” He listed various significant events including getting married, having children, and eventually retiring. He ended his speech quipping I’m not looking forward to the next major event! We all smiled uncomfortably! My father died in 1995 aged 78. That gives me 5 years!
Between 1953 and now, eras came and went. Governments came and went. Archbishops and local clergy came and went, as did dignitaries in local government and industry. There seemed to be a nostalgia for bygone times when Britain was Great…it still is Great Britain but in some ways (but by no means in all cases) a bit tackier than what we seem to remember. However, the miraculous surgery I received at Wythenshawe Hospital, which at the time felt like conveyer belt routine, saved my life. This would have not been the case forty years earlier. Now, after all this and more, the Queen has departed this life, at the very respectable age of 96.
Yesterday, I was invited to, once again, sit around the T.V. at a friend’s house, this time with church colleagues. Whereas in 1953, I hadn’t a clue about the historic occasion I was experiencing, this time, all was perfectly clear as the largest ever gathering of world leaders or their representatives gathered in Westminster Abbey for the first State Funeral since that of Operation Hope Not, in 1965, the name given by Sir Winston Churchill for his funeral. Yesterday was both sad and wonderful at the same time. But there was so much to take in. I know not the number of participants, obviously several thousand. But each individual in the thousands involved were at the very top of his or her game; the military personnel, the trumpeters, musicians, clergy and Church hierarchy, the cameramen and commentators on all TV channels I watched. And I am sure my summing-up of yesterday only covers a “fraction.”
The title of this blog is not quite appropriate…Sometime next year, it wouldn’t surprise me if I joined friends and/or family around a flat-screen television for the Coronation of King Charles III. That really will be Full Circle.
Many thanks for reading, David 09.38 at home.
David's Cruise 