At this time of year I get out the heavy, orange Le Creuset pan given to me in 1984 and reach for the chopping board, the tin opener and a bottle of red wine.
“Gossip and politics, hock and seagulls’ eggs” writes Chips Channon and that encapsulates the tone of his dairies. Two entries though are worth quoting in the light of my recent reading about President Roosevelt.
You are looking at a spectacular tiara – natch, it belongs to the Royal Family. Was it plundered from a Maharajah, “borrowed” from a nabob? No it wasn’t.
Today it is a short blast up the motorway from Barmeath to Gormanston. It’s about twenty miles if you don’t mind paying the toll (my brother does). This was not the case in the 19th century.
Count Egmont was a 17th century Dutch freedom fighter seeking independence from the Spanish Empire in the Low Lands in what became known as the Eighty Years War (1568 – 1648). His story was romanticised by Goethe in his 1787 play, Egmont.
The Second World War and indeed the First – capital letters are an inadequate acknowledgement to the lives lost – are wars in which some of the combatants are known to me and probably you as family and friends. As a Pandemic Plus I’ve gained an incomplete insight into WW II.
After my ancestor, Patrick Bellew, was created Baron Bellew in the Peerage of Ireland in 1848 only three more Irish Peerages were handed out. That doesn’t sound quite right, but you know what I mean; namely Lord Fermoy (1865), Lord Rathdonnell and the Duke of Abercorn (both 1868).
You may recall that Alan Brooke was frustrated by Alexander’s lack of strategic vision in the North African and Italian campaigns in the Second World War (Trials and Tribulations). Was he being unfair?