On this Day in History
Thomas Jones
To put things in perspective, some highlights from Wikipedia's entry on 29 April, 'the 119th day of the year':
711 – Moorish troops led by Tariq ibn-Ziyad land at Gibraltar to begin their invasion of the Iberian Peninsula.
1429 – Joan of Arc arrives to relieve the Siege of Orleans.
1672 – Louis XIV of France invades the Netherlands.
1909 – The Parliament of the United Kingdom passes the People's Budget, the first budget in British history with the expressed intent of redistributing wealth among the British public.
1916 – The British 6th Indian Division surrenders to Ottoman Forces at the Siege of Kut.
1945 – Adolf Hitler marries Eva Braun in a Berlin bunker.
1945 – The Dachau concentration camp is liberated by United States troops.
1951 – Wittgenstein dies.
1970 – United States and South Vietnamese forces invade Cambodia.
1974 – Richard Nixon announces the release of edited transcripts of White House tape recordings related to the Watergate scandal.
1975 – The US begins to evacuate US citizens from Saigon.
1991 – A cyclone strikes the Chittagong district of southeastern Bangladesh with winds of around 155 mph, killing at least 138,000 people and leaving as many as 10 million homeless.
1992 – Riots in Los Angeles, California, following the acquittal of police officers charged with excessive force in the beating of Rodney King.
1997 – The Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993 enters into force, outlawing the production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons by its signatories.
1999 – The Avala TV Tower near Belgrade is destroyed in the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia.
Comments
The strangest and best part of the day for me was the evening in Soho. If possible, the place was even more one huge party than during Pride. (If it's any comfort to republicans, the best music was being played by the 'Citizens not Subjects' crew, closely followed by Gerry's the off licence.)
I don't suppose gay men are actually any more royalist than straight ones, but in Soho they are definitely more flamboyant in their enthusiasm. And James Middleton is on his way to being a pin up boy for the gay community; i heard one very loud and camp "James Middleton, oh my god!" which was received enthusiastically (if adding exclamation marks made something more of an exclamation, that sentence would have needed half a dozen).
The only slightly alarming aspect was all the Prince Phillip masks, which at times, as i became more intoxicated, became genuinely frightening. One of the Prince Phillips asked my wife for a kiss, and she had to reply with a "i'm sorry, i just can't".
There are lots of good reasons for getting rid of the monarchy, but i can't imagine anything else producing the joyous atmosphere there was yesterday or a party quite so good.