Sunday Snaps #12 - A Royal Occasion

Happy Easter everyone! Yes, it's been over a year but Sunday Snaps is back by popular demand!!

The holidays are coming thick and fast right now here in England. It’s a four day weekend for a lot of people this week, with Good Friday and Easter Monday being public holidays and then next weekend will also be a four day break with the Monday being the May Day bank holiday. Friday is, of course, also a public holiday here because of the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. So, for the sake of 3 days leave you can actually have an 11 day break from work! Lovely Jubbly!

As Dori mentioned on her blog a little while ago, the day of the Royal Wedding is also our 5th wedding anniversary and, by happy coincidence, we had arranged to be in London next weekend anyway. So we will spend a great deal of our special day on the streets of the capital enjoying the ambience of the royal occasion. Whether we will actually get to see much remains to be seen, but it is really the atmosphere of the day that we are looking forward to.

We have already seen pretty much all of the royals, including William and Kate – though they were on a break at the time! The first time that we saw William and Harry (and Kate) was at the Concert for Diana back in 2007 on what would have been Diana’s 46th birthday. Here are a couple of snaps we took that day, including one of Harry taken on a mobile phone through a pair of binoculars – hence the very poor quality!

We caught most of the rest of the family at Trooping the Colour in 2009, which I blogged about at the time. It was a little surreal to see them all lined up on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, just as I have seen dozens of times before on TV. Here are a couple of snaps from that day too.

If we do get to see anything of interest on Friday then we will no doubt share that with you here on our blogs. If we don’t then we will just enjoy our wedding anniversary together just as the nation goes wedding crazy!

It promises to be an interesting week.

Random Monday #2 - Yes, already!

So, one week on and here is Random Monday #2. “Not very random” I hear you cry – but the whole point of randomness is that you don’t know when the next one will occur. Who knows, Random Monday #3 may well appear next Monday ...or not. :-)

Thank you for your answers to last week’s question, which ranged from the very mundane (mine included) to the truly extraordinary. Hopefully this week’s question will also provide a wide-ranging variety of answers. So, without further ado, this week’s Random Monday question is:

What was the last concert that you attended?

Now, Dori and I are avid concert-goers, but we have had a bit of a drought lately because of a number of factors. In order to go to a decent concert over here we usually have to travel into London, and often stay overnight as the trains don’t run quite late enough for us to get back. So, concert-going is not a cheap occupation, especially considering the already astronomical prices for the tickets themselves. Added to that, there haven’t been too many of our favourite acts touring lately. We missed out on seeing Alicia Keys at The O2 in the spring, and have been searching the listings ever since but nothing has really caught our eye.

The last concert that we should have gone to was, of course, Michael Jackson’s “This Is It” tour, also at The O2 in London. We were too excited for words at the prospect, and then completely shattered when the awful events of June last year unfolded. For a while, we didn’t feel like we wanted to go to see anyone in concert at all. Having seen the subsequent film of the same name, we know that the concert would have been out of this world, and simply extraordinary. What a loss.

So, I still haven’t answered the question. I have had to rack my brains, because we saw two or three concerts very close together last spring and I’m not entirely sure which one was actually the last. But I believe the answer is that the last concert we went to was the magnificent, incomparable and truly legendary Tina Turner. Once again this was at the O2 (can you spot a pattern here?) and she was simply amazing. Ms Turner is no longer a spring chicken, but boy did she have energy to spare that night! And she knows how to put on a show too, with great choreography, costume changes and visual effects. We had a fantastic night, sung along to almost every song, and were able to cross another off of our Legends We Must See list!! Truly wonderful.

The O2 in Greenwich, London

It is only now that it has sunk in how long ago that was. We really do need to get out and see somebody else is concert very soon. There is nothing like the Live Music experience. I will have to get back to searching the listings again – there must be somebody out there who’s worth paying the price for!!

As always with Random Monday, I would be fascinated to hear your answers too. Leave me a comment and tell me who was your last concert experience! Have a good week everyone!

Rest in Peace, Michael

I'm going to be unoriginal today. I imagine that three quarters of the blogosphere - if not more - will be blogging today about Michael Jackson, and I am no different.

We heard the news that he had been taken to hospital with a suspected heart attack while we were on Twitter yesterday evening (UK time). That news alone was such a shock, but as we monitored the internet and flicked between CNN, the BBC and Sky News as the night wore on, the news just got worse and worse. It was literally unbelieveable. Not Michael Jackson, it CAN'T be true.

But as we all know, that terrible news was indeed true and we have lost an icon, a musical genius and a true pioneer. Dori and I have been very lucky to see some true greats in concert over the last few years - Prince, Madonna, Tina Turner, Stevie Wonder to name a few - artists who have provided the soundtrack to our lives. But Michael Jackson probably did that better than any of them. From his time with the Jackson 5 to his amazingly successful solo career, MJ just churned out iconic song after iconic song. And there aren't many music videos that you can vividly remember seeing for the first time, but that was certainly true of Thriller - shown here late at night on Channel 4 amidst much ballyhoo. He was oft impersonated but never remotely equalled. We have lost a giant of music, of pop culture, who I cannot imagine will ever be equalled.

We hadn't mentioned it here before, but Dori and I had been wonderfully lucky earlier this year when the tickets went on sale for MJ's 50 concerts at the O2 in London, and we were able to get 2 tickets to see him perform on July 24th, just 4 weeks from today. Neither of us had ever seen him in concert before, and obviously now we never will get that chance. We had both been so excited at this too rare an opportnity and were counting down the days til we could be there watching him moonwalk. In a way, that just makes this sad news even more unbelievable. Every time the news programmes show a picture of MJ with the caption "1958 - 2009" it seems so unreal. It just cannot be true.

The music died again this day. Rest in Peace, Michael.

(Almost) This Day in History

It was 15 years ago yesterday that Nelson Mandela became President of South Africa, and so ended three centuries of white rule in the country. It was an historic day, not just for South Africa, but also for the whole world. The injustices of the hateful apartheid regime were torn away and finally all the people of South Africa were allowed the opportunity to give voice to their hopes and dreams for the future. It was a symbolic day to show the world that we are all one and that nobody should be judged on how they look, or what colour their skin may be.


Dori and I were very privileged last year to be able to see Mr Mandela in the flesh. We had managed to get tickets to the concert in Hyde Park last June to celebrate his 90th birthday. Naturally, we were both extremely excited to get this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. When Mr Mandela came out onto the stage to give his speech, there was a wave of love and awe that flowed from all over the concert ground towards the stage. It was a remarkable moment, and it is one that I know neither Dori nor I will ever forget. Nelson Mandela is truly a man of our time, and his name will live long in the history books as a man of great courage, humanity and rare compassion.