The Queen's 80th Birthday!

On Friday it was the Queen's 80th Birthday and my partners son, Alan, had the honour, nay duty to march through London with his school band to lead a procession to deliver a birthday card to her.

However having had this whole thing organised Queenie decided to spend the day at Windsor and so they marched to an empty Buckingham Palace. As you can imagine most of the band were a bit peeved they had to march 4 and a half miles from St Pauls Cathedral to the Palace to deliver an item knowing the person receiving wasn't it. It didn't bode well for an enthusiastic performance!

Irrespective of this, we prepared the lad well and made sure his school uniform was all prim and proper and dropped him off at the school ready for him to join the coach up to London. We then made the dash to the local train station so we could get up to London to watch him. (Note the school did not offer transport to supporting parents).

We arrived about half hour before they were due to set off and as we approached Alan we noticed his pristine Housey Coat (think Neo's coat in Matrix) was sporting a lovely smear! OMG he's been out of our sight for the best part of 2 hours and this??? We discover one of the other lads had unfortunatley suffered with travel sickness and thus thought his friends Housey could do with some additions! We understand copious amounts of bottled water were used to dilute the spill and it was passable. Fortunately for Alan he has to wear a leopard skin thing as he's a Tenor Drummer so this would offer concealment!

Although Queenie was out the band did her proud and marched through London. It was the first time Alan has had to do a performance in public and it certainly dropped him in the deep end as it wasn't a short foray! He was very rosy cheeked and lethargic from twiddling the drum sticks. He has to twirl the Tenor Drum sticks above his head throughout the march. We took a few pictures (understatement) and were rewarded later by spotting him on the 6 0'clock news albeit briefly.