Danskcolin: Saturday June 17th 2023

10:45 Lois takes a rest from baking my Fathers Day cake for tomorrow, and, still with her baking apron on, she sits down on the sofa with me to watch this morning's "Trooping the colour" ceremony in London - King Charles's first in his own right.

Gosh, my mother would be proud of us, if she were still around, no doubt about that!

we sit down to watch Charles's first Trooping the Colour in his own right

It's funny to think, that when Lois and I were younger, we often claimed we were somehow "too busy" to watch Trooping the Colour live, and we used to just see glimpses of it when we were round at my mother's, seeing to her needs, or that we just contented ourselves with the "highlights" TV programme in the evening. But that was then, and this is now.

And, incredibly, we haven't yet succumbed to "royal occasion fatigue", which is nice! After all it's been an astonishing year, hasn't it, since last year's Trooping the Colour, having had Queen Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee, her funeral, and Charles's coronation. We've never known anything like it, not in our lives. And it's hard to believe that a year like this will ever be seen again.

Trooping the Colour is always nice to watch, however, if only for the music during the marching up and down at Horse Guards parade - it always gets us right here, especially the Huguenots March: glorious!

How many times, in the last 12 months or so, have we seen the Mall down from Buckingham Palace, festooned with flags? But you can't beat it as a spectacle, can you - be fair!

It's always nice to catch a glimpse of Kate with Camilla, and the princes George and little Louis, and Princess Charlotte, isn't it!

And remember - you can always zip through my photos below if you've seen them yourself already. Just contact me and ask: letters only please - I guarantee that my notoriously "bureaucratic" permission process has become little more than a formality these days, and it's also surprisingly quick, I think you'll find. I've cut out a lot of the "red tape" this year, which is nice!

And it's good to see our top politicians not all arguing for once!

Rishi and his wife.....

...and Keir and family

And, for sheer anticipation, can you top those few minutes when the policemen gradually let the crowds slowly flood down the Mall to the Palace? Followed by the gradual emergence of the royals onto the balcony. It's always thrilling to see, isn't it.

And then finally the flypast by the Red Arrows, as the royals watch from the palace balcony.

Fabulous stuff, isn't it! When's the next one? Oh yes, June 2024: it's funny to think we probably won't get another of these "do's" for the next 12 months. But to be on the safe side, put it in your calendars now, please, to make sure of not missing it!

Goodbye and see you all again next year! Personally, Lois and I can't wait - I think we're becoming addicts!

13:00 But now it's time to have lunch and go to bed - it's still surprisingly hot today, although we had a bit of rain early this morning, which was nice. Anyway we're going to fling the bedroom windows wide open again - we've become a bit devil-may-care recently haha!

15:30 I check my smartphone. The world doesn't stop for a royal ceremony in the UK, does it. And there's an alarming story that's come in from Tünde, my Hungarian pen-friend, about how Hungary's crazy Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, has been continuing to enrich himself, his relatives, and his cronies, often at public expense, with a life-style fit for a king.

This is Viktor's family's new "palace", Hatvanpuszta, now close to complete and extraordinarily lavish refurbishment, an estate originally established by Archduke Joseph of Austria in the 1820's.

The influential Hungarian news website 444.hu reports, "Good news: the gardeners have already finished, the great work was completely completed on the day of the debate on the status law. Only the swimming pools (there are two of them) and the garden ponds (three) need to be filled with water... and the Prime Minister can finally enjoy the fruits of his life's work in all its glory."

Well, that's all right then! What a relief to know that Viktor, his family and his cronies, won't ever be short of a swimming-pool or two in their old age!

What a crazy world we live in ! [I'll let you have that one on this occasion! - Ed]

16:00 We get up when we remember the promise of two of the little coffee-and-walnut-but-without-the-walnut cup cakes which Lois baked this morning to accompany my full-scale coffee cake for tomorrow's Fathers Day.

Go on, have one yourself - you know you want to haha!

17:00 A call from the nice man in Avenue Drive, a mile away from here, who's had another of our Amazon deliveries erroneously "dumped" on his doorstep. And he lives A MILE AWAY FROM HERE!

Do you remember how the lawn-mower I ordered from Amazon a couple of months ago was mysteriously delivered to this nice man's house, on more than one occasion, until Amazon finally refunded me the money, seemingly unable to find our house?

And do you remember how I was unable to tell Amazon about the fiasco, because you can't phone and talk to a real person, and their software doesn't allow any complaints which don't conform to their rigid "rules for complaints", which limit possible complaints to about five grounds-for-complaint, with no facility to add any more? You can complain that your package was delivered "to a neighbour", but they don't do anything about that anyway, because they assume you've got the package now, and that you are just feeling mildly disgruntled about it: "problem solved" in their eyes.

What total madness !!!!!

We thought the problem had finally been resolved because something our daughter Alison ordered for us from Amazon was delivered here last week, correctly, to our house and left on our doorstep. But we can see now that this problem still hasn't gone away.

We drive over to the nice man's house to collect our 2 packages, and, bless him, he's already waiting for us out on the pavement outside his house with the two packages in his hands, a foot spa and a wheat-bag pain reliever that we had ordered for our daughter Sarah's birthday next week. Amazon, however, is already claiming that they have delivered it today to our "front door or porch".

It must be a problem with a particular local delivery firm, I'm guessing - either the driver is illiterate and/or doesn't speak English, or is very short-sighted so he can't read the address on the package, or is a madman, or else his satnav is faulty. So I've got to see if I can work out which of Amazon's multiple delivery firms it was. If this doesn't work, we'll just have to give up on Amazon and give our business to their competitors.

No skin off our nose haha!!!!

But what a crazy world we live in!

20:00 I'd do anything for a gin-and-tonic right now, but my bottle of Hendricks has run out, and although we've got a bottle of Gordon's unopened, that's officially my Fathers Day present, so it would be "bad form" to have some of that a day early. Call me an over-zealous stickler for the rules if you like haha!