Hatch and Dispatch

Some myths become facts; one is that Prince Philip was born on a kitchen table in Corfu.

He was born on this unexceptional, well polished, dining room table now in the Board Room of shipbroker Howe Robinson Partners’. This has been called into question. If I may digress, my father-in-law was laid out on his dining room table; the family thought it fitting to keep him at home rather than consign him to a mortuary alongside strangers and I agree. But coming into this world on a dining room table, although rarer, is easily explained. Sorry, digression: I was born in Hatch Street, Dublin.

The bedrooms upstairs at Mon Repos, a name more redolent of Valley Fields in the novels of PG Wodehouse than a royal birthplace, would have been somewhere between hot and jolly hot in June 1921;

the dining room, much cooler and close to the kitchen with maids and hot water in abundance. I wonder about the orange crate that supposedly served as his cot when he left Corfu in a hurry aboard HMS Calypso? No doubt it will turn up on Antiques Roadshow.

Meanwhile there’s a pip in one of the falcons’ eggs. Pip describes the first crack and hole in an egg, created by a chick as it tries to hatch. After pipping, a chick may remain in the egg for a day or two before emerging completely. I hope Prince Philip didn’t upset the dining arrangements at Mon Repos for so long; a youngest child can be so trying, as my grandmother said of me.