Royal integrity

I woke up feeling exhausted this morning. Owain and I talked until well after midnight, and then as I was getting ready for bed I heard the sound of water dripping and a wet floor in the bathroom. It didn't take me long to find that the joint connecting the hot water pipe to the tap was leaking. I got some tools and made an attempt to tighten the joint, but another nose bleed started, due to the awkwardness of the position in which I was bending over to do this. 

Fortunately Owain took over and slowed the leak from one drop a second to three drops a minute, so it was safe to leave with a bucket underneath it to catch the drips. Fortunately too, the nose bleed didn't last for long, the lesion is closing progressively, I just have to be careful about bending over, and my sleeping position. I went to sleep sitting up, around one fifteen, and slept poorly. It was ten by the time we all surfaced for our Saturday pancake breakfast, and afterwards I returned to bed and dozed until lunchtime. I didn't fully recover until I'd walked in the park for an hour and a half.

Owain left us before lunch as he had engagements later in the day back in Bristol. After a chick pea curry for supper, we three watched 'The King's Decision' on BBC Four. I think the last time I watched it was on Channel Four. It's a powerful film, beautifully made about the Nazi occupation of Norway, and the refusal of King Haakon to deal with Hitler without consultation and the agreement of the legally elected government. 

He was the first monarch to be chosen by citizens after Norway regained its independence from Sweden in 1905. His sole sovereign intervention was a threat to abdicate if the cabinet agreed to negotiate with Quisling, the author of the Nazi coup d'etat in Norway. His role as king, he believed, was to uphold the democratic system which chose him as head of state. The royal family took refuge in the USA for the rest of the war, while the king and his entourage got to London and from there worked to support the Norwegian resistance campaign. It's an impressive royal story by any account, and interesting to set alongside recent revelations about the role of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. They had their own  network of relationships with Europe's royal families and made use of them independently of the British government to gather information from abroad and feed it back into the war effort. Because there were a few Nazi sympathisers in the royal family before the war, Hitler was convinced the King could be won over. The reality was different. The fool who thinks he's king is not the one who is called to be king