The thing is, it's come to my attention that my blog has not just been read by people in Britain. Oh no, other countries have briefly looked at it too. So I thought, well, for the benefit of them, shouldn't I explain something English?
Well, other countries, over the past few days (2-5th of June) HM Queen Elizabeth II has been celebrating 60 years of being the monarch of 16 states known as the Commonwealth. This, my foreign friends, is known as the Diamon Jubilee. And it basically constitutes for lots of flag waving, street partying and telly watching. Oh, and a few free days off.
Now, our good Queen Liz was born in 1926. And at the time everyone thought it was very unlikely that she would be queen at all- so I bet those people are all feeling pretty stupid at this point.
The word 'accession' basically means a new Sovereign is taking the throne after the death of the previous King or Queen. And loads of people come to see it, and the special person reads a declaration and takes and oath and it's all well and good. This happened to the Queen on the 6th of February 1952. This begs the question- with all this excitement going on- who was going to be celebrating Bob Marley's birthday?
After that the Queen did a whole lot of monarching. 60 years to be exact. In which time she made lots of speeches and did lots of good things and was generally pretty awesome. Which is why over the past few days there's been concerts and flotillas (I don't know if you saw, rest of the world, but on the day of the flotilla it was absolutely weeing down which I suppose is a salute to Britain in itself.)
However, during the concert last night Prince Philip (that's the Queen's husband for the rest of the world) was not present because he's been unwell which is a shame because it was actually a pretty good concert and the queen now has to go to the service at St Paul's Cathedral with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (for the Americans among you, that's so totes Wills and Kate) rather than with her husband.
The concert opened with Robbie Williams and had Jessie J and Cliff Richard and Grace Jones (who hula hooped for her entire performance, hats off to her) and Elton John and lots of other people.
Speaking of Elton John, for the entirety of his performance I couldn't get a certain thought out of my mind.
In America, I'm led to believe they have these things called peeps. They're basically sugar, covered with more sugar, doused in sugar and on the odd occasion dipped in chocolate. Elton John, to me, looked like a melted peep playing piano.
Can you not see the resemblance?
I thought I'd finish off with some facts about the Queen:
The Queen has answered around 3.5 million items of correspondence. If I were her I'd probably be sick of it by now.
With her husband she's sent about 45,000 Christmas Cards during her reign.
She learnt to drive in 1945.
She has 30 godchildren.
The queen currently has three corgis called Monty, Willow and Holly.
Today's song feature's Prince Harry on the tambourine!
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