June 2023

Of course I watched the Coronation. I knew I would, because I still have such vivid memories of That Other Coronation, which took place in June, 1953. We didn’t have television in Australia then, but were able to see a film of the proceedings itself at the local picture theatre some time later. And our school put on a display that had taken months of rehearsal, and was presented on the day at the local football ground.

Letters had gone home to instruct mothers as to their responsibilities: each child had to wear a cape in red, white or blue. I remember feeling very inferior and deprived when I scored a white one, which in reality was an old sheet that was definitely less-than-Persil-white: luckier children were clad in red or blue crepe paper.

I was also very jealous of my younger sister, who was decked out in full Scottish regalia on the day, and took her place on one of the floats, depicting scenes from British history and representations of Empire, that moved slowly around the boundary line, while lesser mortals (me in my white sheet) obeyed orders. We marched into position in the centre of the ground, and then awaited the signal to kneel and crouch, thus forming the display ER II. One of my classmates, with whom I’m still in touch after all these decades, can still remember that he was on the bar of the E, but I can’t remember where I was , or what colour cape he had: I just bet it wasn’t a bit of old sheet, though. The whole effort must have looked quite good from the air (the township had an aero club), or from the highest row in the not-very-grand stand, but of course we kids saw only a few capes to the front and to the sides. 

King Charles’s Coronation was spectacular: the Brits do these things so well. Of course there were quibbles: ex-pat English friends, for example, could not cope with the Gospel-style song and switched their TV sets off at that stage. I’ve always liked Gospel music, so my set stayed on. And it was clear that this rendition was another attempt by the King to promote and practise the policy of inclusion. The music in general was predictably beautiful. To my surprise my Greek daughter-in-law also watched everything, and was very admiring, but said she thought the late Queen’s funeral went more smoothly. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘the people involved in that had been rehearsing for twenty years or more.’ 

A friend wrote from Athens to say that the bells at her neighbouring church were tolling the way they do on Good Friday. It took her some little time to work out that they were tolling because it was May the 29^th, the anniversary of the Fall of Constantinople. The actual date is Tuesday the 29^th of May 1453, and Tuesday rather than Friday remains an unlucky day for Greeks. That Tuesday marked the end of an era: the Byzantine Empire had lasted a thousand years. The dream of regaining the City compelled the generations, and was part of the motivation of the Great Catastrophe of 1922, as a result of which the great Greek city of Smyrna was burned and a population exchange was forced upon Turkish-speaking Greeks and Greek-speaking Turks.

Another friend, travelling in Vietnam for the first time, has sent me photos of two shops: Kafeville and Greek Souvlaki. Who would have thought it? And the Vietnamese used the Greek letter phi correctly! Of course the Greeks and their influence are everywhere. My middle son and his wife have discovered at least two Greek restaurants in Warsaw, and long ago a friend drove me to the centre of Amsterdam, and parked her car in a big parking area. ‘We must remember where we’ve parked the car,’ she said. ‘I won’t forget,’ I said. ‘See?’ And I pointed to a Greek restaurant immediately opposite.

Inconvenient happenings lately. Both electricity and water have been off. On separate days, fortunately. Still, things of this nature are much better than they were decades ago when I first settled in the villages. The weather has also been inconvenient lately. Rather tropical, really, with rain every afternoon and cloud cover for quite a few hours of the day: so unlike the usual stable and merry month of May.

I will persist in reading harrowing books. My latest effort is Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves, which is a personal history of Ireland. O’Toole was born in 1958, and so traces the history since then. It is a deeply researched and well-written book, in which the author does not spare his compatriots in his treatment of the period known as The Troubles and the poor record of the Catholic Church with regard to the children in their care. He also objects to what he calls Irish exceptionalism, the sentimental view that no group of people has suffered as much as the Irish. I would put the Poles and the Greeks well in competition for that dubious prize, along with many other cultures. But there is plenty of grim suffering detailed in this book. Despite this, I recommend it to anybody wanting to understand modern Ireland.