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Windsor Castle back in the limelight
Windsor Castle has been in the news this week for reasons that require no explanation. Suffice to say the Brits are still quite good at putting on a show with plenty of horses, hats and bagpipes.
Having been born and raised in Reading about 30 kilometres up the River Thames from Windsor, the event evoked some memories. For a start, because of the regal presence at Windsor it meant I was brought up in the "Royal County" of Berkshire and not just any old county. Admittedly it didn't really mean much apart from Reading football club being nicknamed "The Royals".
My first visit to the castle was as a pre-teen. I can't remember much about it except being slightly disappointed that Queen Elizabeth didn't lean out of a castle turret and wave "hello". At the same time I was quite excited as it was my first visit to a real castle. In Reading we had a Castle Street and Castle Hill but alas no castle, well not since the 12th century anyway.
There is something about castles that trigger the imagination and I can understand why tourists, particularly Americans, get so excited about them. In fact I would say the American tourists know considerably more about British castles than the British.
I went to Windsor several times in the 1960s. As a teenager I remember playing in a football match for our school against a Windsor team in a park adjacent to the castle. Despite the fancy historical backdrop I had a poor game, possibly because I spent too much time looking at the touchline to see if the queen had come out to watch while taking her corgis for a walk.
Alas the game was watched by the proverbial three men and a dog, and the hound in question was definitely not a corgi.
Emma the horse
My most recent memory of Windsor Castle is a rather poignant one. It was three years ago during the funeral procession of Queen Elizabeth.
That's when we saw Queen Elizabeth's favourite horse, Emma, obediently standing there between the flowers watching the hearse go by. The lovely black fell pony which Elizabeth rode even when she was in her 90s, looked so forlorn as if it knew it had just lost a dear friend. There was even the queen's headscarf on the pony's saddle.
I think that sparked my first tear of that moving day. Then came the corgis who also sensed something bad had happened.
How strange that after spending hours watching the weeping crowds it took Queen Elizabeth's four-legged friends to trigger my first teardrops.
Arundel conkers
Speaking of castles, on a trip to England some years ago I happened to be with a party of American tourists visiting Arundel Castle in West Sussex.
The grounds of Arundel were full of horse chestnut trees or "conker trees" as kids call them. After walking around the castle grounds for an hour one American came up to me in animated fashion. Apparently while he was strolling around the grounds he was approached by an aristocratic-looking gentleman who spoke "posh" and challenged him to a game of conkers. The conker man introduced himself as the Duke of Norfolk (also known as the Earl of Arundel), the owner of the castle.
"Hell, there I was with this real duke who started talking about conkers and I didn't even know what a conker was," the American told me.
Picking up steam
During my trainspotting days some of the outstanding steam engines on the western region were named after castles. There were more than 150 of them and somehow I managed to see them all, including No 4082, Windsor Castle. It was one of the few engines not named after a castle in the West Country or Wales. Among the wonderful list of such fortifications were Abergavenny, Carmatthen, Criccieth, Havorfordwest.
The castle engines pulled the express trains from Paddington to the West Country and south Wales and would come thundering through Reading General station at high speeds, a truly magnificent sight. I was very envious of those passengers as any trains I travelled on always seemed to stop at every station.
I may have been useless at school but I was the only one in our class who could name more than 100 castles.
Farewell to Sundance
Back in 1976 I was fortunate enough to be in a Chiang Mai village on the set of a Thai film Mae Nak America (American Wife). During a break the leading man Krung Sivalai and some of the supporting actors were sitting around having an informal chat. When asked who was his favourite actor Krung replied without hesitation "Robert Redford" and everyone nodded in agreement.
That's just an example of how widely revered was the American actor who sadly passed away this week. His appeal was global and well deserved and he seemed to have been around forever.
Krung's answer hardly came as a surprise as Redford's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting ('73) had both been huge hits in Thailand where audiences loved the "buddy" movies with handsome stars.
My personal favourite was the lesser-known spy film Three Days of the Condor ('75) and All the President's Men ('76) concerning the journalists whose investigative work on Watergate helped lead to the resignation of Richard Nixon.
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