Friday 3 August 2018

Hairy Legs and True Romance

I was living in London when the engagement of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer was announced. I was very young, but I suspect that even if I hadn't been I would have been swept up in the fairytale that the Palace sold to the British public in the following days and weeks.

Sadly, it emerged later that what the public had been led to believe was an exquisite example of true romance actually wasn't any kind of love story. The beautiful princess was not the object of her prince's undying - or quite possibly any other kind of - love.

So it is cheering to discover that there really can be fairytale princesses:




And, even though, as you can read here, (a free ebook that also contains a lovely piece of writing by my younger daughter), I have been brought up in the belief (feeble, laughable and ridiculous) that my family should in fact be occupying the royal palaces of Denmark, given how delightful the current occupants of the royal roles are, I am especially happy that we are not.

In fact, given the wife of Denmark's crown prince was Australian when they married, could Australia please not become a republic but simply swap royal families after the current British queen's death, taking the Danish Queen or King as our head of state in future? Wouldn't that be rather nice?

6 comments:

  1. Perhaps Denmark and the Commonwealth could arrange to swap Greenland for Australia. As I recall, they look to be of comparable size on maps using the Mercator projection.

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  2. Can that really be true about their respective sizes? I'm going to have to go and pull the atlas out and have a look

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    1. Australia is about four times the size of Greenland. However, the Mercator projection, in order to show compass courses as lines, exaggerates areas according their distance from the Equator. Therefore on a map using the Mercator projection, Greenland (between about 60 and about 82 degrees north latitude) looks larger than Australia (between about 12 and about 38 degrees south latitude.)

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  3. i don’t think I’ve ever mentioned (it’s a secret that we’ve tried to keep within the confines of the family) that I suffer from a self-diagnosed (in fact self-invented) condition called geographical dyslexia? I am totally incapable of grasping anything about any map I have ever seen. In my mind Germany is west of England. In fact, the entire continent is, floating somewhere halfway to the fair land where you reside

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    1. From time to time I appear to suffer the delusion that there is a West Pole, located somewhere around San Jose, California. This comes out chiefly in the notion that the inland parts of China are east of its coast, but west of (say) Kazakhstan. Perhaps this derives from the use of "Orient" to describe Asia, when in fact the shortest way there is west.

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