Forgot About the Wedding

I forgot about the wedding this weekend.  Should have saved all those last few postcards for the build up to the big day!

So, in honor of the royal wedding, a few more postcards from England.

Here we have the beefeaters, more formerly known as  Yeomen Warders of Her Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress the Tower of London. One of their primary roles is as guardians of the crown jewels which reside in the Tower of London.  If I were marrying into the royal family, I would certainly want to try on a few of those crown jewels, just for fun.

Dye Cut Postcards

No, this isn't a picture clipped out of people magazine.  It's one of a huge stack of postcards my son brought back from Europe this summer, and gave to me for Christmas.  A dye cut card of Lady Di - a double dye/di, if you will.

I'm always a sucker for an irregularly shaped postcard, and this one is particularly good.  Plus with all the talk of another royal wedding, it seemed fitting, somehow.....

Just for fun, here's another:

Might as well stay in England for a quick cup o' tea, as well.

For a few more dye cut cards, click here (Michael Jordan), here (Stonehenge), and here (manatee).

Stonehenge I

Gotta love the irregularly shaped postcards.  This one of Stonehenge comes from my son, during his stint at Oxford last summer.

Archaeologists have mostly determined that Stonehenge was used more as an ancient burial ground as opposed to serving as a astronomical calculator and/or observatory, although it may have had some significance to the winter solstice.

No matter the science, 20,000 people showed up for the summer solstice in 2005, and  it's much more romantic to think about this organized pile of rocks as a place of ancient worship and Druid ritual.   From the Wiki:

Throughout the twentieth century, Stonehenge began to be revived as a place of religious significance, this time by adherents of Neopagan and New Age beliefs, particularly the Neo-druids: the historian Ronald Hutton would later remark that "it was a great, and potentially uncomfortable, irony that modern Druids had arrived at Stonehenge just as archaeologists were evicting the ancient Druids from it." The first such Neo-druidic group to make use of the megalithic monument was the Ancient Order of Druids, who performed a mass initiation ceremony there in August 1905, in which they admitted 259 new members into their organisation. This assembly was largely ridiculed in the press, who mocked the fact that the Neo-druids were dressed up in costumes comprising of white robes and fake beards.

From 1972 until 1984, Stonehenge was the setting for a free music festival, until the "Battle of the Beanfield" in 1985.  This infamous battle was "waged" between new age travelers and the local police.  I particularly like the headline from the BBC on that day about the incident:  Hippies clash with police at Stonehenge.  As always, one man's clash is another man's battle. 

Imperial War Rooms

Two postcards from the Imperial War Museum which consists of five locations, three in London.  The most recent of the five is the Churchill War Rooms, opened in London in 1984.

Both of the postcards are reprints of  "public service announcement" posters of the day.  I can understand about eating carrots for your eyes, but it's not clear to me what "Save Bread and you save lives" and "Serve Potatoes and you serve the country" mean. 

Any thoughts?










P.S.  It's Postcard Friendship Friday.  You know what to do.

One More Royal Post

Whatever happened to Fergie? Or as she was more formerly known, Sarah, Duchess of York? For that matter, whatever happened to Prince Andrew, Duke of York and Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie?

You can follow the links, above, or here's a quick summary. Sarah has the Sarah Ferguson Foundation, which is dedicated to advocating for "wellness and motherhood" and is active in publishing and broadcasting, both as a writer and producer. Prince Andrew (who has his own website here) serves as the United Kingdom's Special Representative for International Trade and Investment. He's an avid golfer, and a regular goose hunting companion of the President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Princess Beatrice is a university student who occasionally engages in princess-like behavior - gracing a variety of functions with her presence. She looks a lot like her mother. She is the fifth and first female in the line of succession to the throne. Princess Eugenie is a university student as well.

The Royals, Continued - A Minor Royal

HRH Prince Edward, a younger brother of Prince Charles. Once third in line for the succession to the throne, he is now seventh. It's not likely he'll ever be King.

I sent this postcard to my husband (then boyfriend) the very first time I ever took a trip that necessitated a passport - my friend Carol and I went to England for about nine days. We had a blast, staying mostly in London, but renting a car for a couple of days to visit Oxford and Stratford-upon-Avon. This card reminded me that in Stratford-upon-Avon, after a very nice dinner in a Shakespearian era restaurant, we went into a local bar, where we found more than one Boy George look-alike, complete with hair, make up and clothes. Having always been a huge Boy George fan, this was one of the highlights of our trip, and such a contrast to the history and culture we had up to this point immersed ourselves in.

Makes me laugh, just thinking about it.

Blast From The Past

While looking for a Union Jack themed card yesterday, I came across this portrait of the ex-Prince & Princess of Wales. They both look so young! Bad hairdos, too.

The Union Jack

Today is Postcard Friendship Friday, and the theme is (loosely) the Union Jack. The hostess of PFF found some very cool Union Jack Converse High Tops on line, and is looking forward to wearing them.

In any case, my contribution to the theme is this postcard ad for the BMW MINI, first launched in April 2001. It was the successor of the original Mini (note deliberate difference in capitalization), produced by British Motor Corporation from 1965 through 2000. The original Mini was similar in cult status to the VW Beetle, although the VW Beetle predates the BMC Mini by almost 40 years.

Notice there is a head sticking out the driver's side (British driver side) window of the car. On the back, the card says "Helen Bell. Flag Maker." The only Helen Bell I can find is a folk singer in England. Conceivably, everybody (but me) knows Helen Bell, and this is a bit of a joke. The timing of the release of her first album, and her finalist status on the BBC Radio Young Folk Award in 2000 would coincide nicely with the release of the car.

Anybody know?

A Beheading Block from Tower of London

Okay, two London postcards in a row maybe isn't cool. But they are posted for very different rea
sons. (In the spirit of full disclosure, it's what I scanned into the laptop before leaving for vacation.)

This postcard makes me think of three things:

1) Sending postcards back to the office when on vacation. This is one of the things I miss about working in an office. I've found a lot of postcards to various companies from a variety of colleagues in my collection. At one time, colleagues were a primary source for collecting.

2) My friend (at the time colleague) that sent this is a copywriter/food writer, and we've always competed with each other in the pun area (mostly so we could engage in insane cackling). Both her insane cackling and bad puns made the card.

3) Dana Carvey's "Church Lady". For a time, "....I don't know. Who made me do it? Could it be SATAN?" was part of the popular vernacular. It's funny how phrases like this are ubiquitous for a time, then just seem to disappear in thin air.

Home Away From Home, For A Time

For a couple of years, I traveled a lot, often to London. I must have stayed in the Langham Hilton 20 or more times.

My favorite thing about this hotel is the staircase. It is very wide with a beautiful red carpet. The stairs themselves have a very low rise. You could run down them really fast, or glide down them, pretending to be British royalty. An old, elegant hotel like this evokes these kinds of actions, a least for me.

London

I've been to London twenty or thirty times, almost always for business. I was there so often, it became difficult to find a postcard I hadn't already sent home. Here's one that shows a variety of classic London images.

The message reminded me that I was there on election day. It was fascinating. Everybody votes, but it's fast - you vote for the party. Then everybody goes to all night parties to wait for the election results. The next day, the results are in, and the new guy (in this case Tony Blair) moves in to 10 Downing Street. It's so FAST. I had to wonder how they had time to put up new towels and change the sheets.