Royal spectacular

A cloudy start to the day, but the clouds were driven away by a strong cold east wind in the middle of the day. After a pancake breakfast, I started the preparatory work for a wedding blessing in Sotogrande in my first week there by writing an email to ask the bride what I needed to know to help them prepare an order of service leaflet. Then I went for an hour's walk while Clare made lunch. We went for a walk together after we'd eaten for a cup of tea at the Secret Garden cafe. A lot of walking for one day over fourteen kilometres. On the way back Clare bought some strawberries in the Co-op and made several pots of jam, as last year's strawberry jam is almost finished.

I also bought a bereavement card to send to Jill Robinson, whose husband David died recently. Both were in the Holy Trinity Geneva choir when we there there, and he retired from the World Health Organisation around the time we left for Monaco. David had a life changing car accident after they settled in Devon, which disabled him. I'm amazed he's lasted into his eighties. 

I'll never forget David arriving at church one Sunday morning having just arrived from a visit to the Goma refugee camp in Eastern Zaire, one of several in the Great Lakes region sheltering two million refugees fleeing the Rwandan genocide. Rwandan soldiers came over the border to attack and loot the camp, killing many. The inability of the UN to protect camps it set up was regarded as a monumental humanitarian failure at the time. Churchgoers learned about it in the news. I can't remember if David was scheduled to preach that morning, or if he was offered a chance to speak instead of the sermon, but I recall the sense of shock and outrage he conveyed. He dared pose the question - where is God in all this? But at that moment was unable to propose an answer. 

In that same period of our time in Geneva the war in Bosnia was also going on, with the siege of Sarajevo, and the massacre of 8,000 at Srebrenica. Some of the peace negotiations took place in Geneva and for a couple of years the city's security measures were ramped up, with barbed wire and soldiers on guard outside key international organisation buildings - a surreal experience, so far from the horrendous violence which blighted both Africa and Europe at that time. Until that time in my life I think I could call myself a liberal optimist about the world as I knew it. These events troubled me greatly, and made me more pessimistic about human progress in the face of Islamist fundamentalism and the steep decline of western Christianity, not to mention the environmental crisis of which I was aware, creeping up on the world, largely unheeded.

We watched the Jubilee concert from Buckingham Palace this evening, thankfully from the very start, so we we joined the nation enjoying the complete surprise of an opening comic sequence featuring Paddington Bear taking tea with the Queen, in which he produces a marmalade sandwich from his hat, and she produces one from her royal handbag. It don't know how this was done, but it was hilarious as it was playful. 

I had to spend a lot of time googling to find out about the multitude of performers appearing in a fast moving amazingly produced spectacle, celebrating the diversity of British life and culture as it has evolved over the past seventy years. Half of the performers I'd never heard of. Diana Ross and Nile Rodgers were among the star American imports, but it seemed to me that all other contributors were English, nobody Welsh, Scottish or Irish. Each of the Celtic fringe nations may have had a local concert equivalent of their own, but really was this a conscious policy decision or just unconscious bias?

Prince William and Prince Charles spoke eloquently about the Queen and both with a strong accent on conservation as a passionate concern inspired by her and Prince Philip's environmental interest. This is an important moment, making it clear the Queen's legacy will be found in continuing royal advocacy over the health of the planet.

As darkness fell much was made of innovative powerful lighting technology to project video on to the entire facade of the Palace, featuring the Queen's reign and the natural world. There was what I believe to have been an aerial display using a swarm of small drones carrying LED lights serving as pixels to build up colourful pictures in the sky. That's only a guess. This new tech' was used during the Tokyo Olympic and Chinese Winter Olympic ceremonies. I can't imagine how else it could have been done, 

A good time was surely had by all involved including a global TV audience. How long before someone does the sums and works out the total carbon footprint of mounting this spectacle, its performers and 22,000 strong audience included? That million trees pledged for planting as a royal Jubilee project are certainly going to be needed for carbon offset.