Happy Birthday Ma'am

Few would accuse Bill Blunt of being a royalist. Legion are the times I've railled on the printed page about the excesses of our Royal Family.

Yet it's (one of) our Queen's birthdays today. So Happy Birthday, Ma'am!

At 81, she still keeps herself busy, even if the sycophants at the Daily Telegraph might have overstated the case a little in their leader article today:

The Queen will have a quiet day at Windsor Castle today to mark her 81st birthday. Most people of her age spend their days quietly the whole year. But the Queen, in addition to her daily engagements at home, is to make a state visit in the first week of May to the United States, 50 years on from her first, when Eisenhower was President.

If truth be known, very few 81 year olds are spending their days quietly nowadays. Dorothy Evans, of Abergavenny, Monmouthshire is a case in point. If the reports are to be believed, she has spent a considerable portion of the decade in the regular harassment of her neighbours. That doesn't strike me as someone sitting quietly at home.

I am also indebted to Chris Dunham, for pointing out another error in the same leading article.

This year's visit is for the 400th anniversary of Jamestown, the first permanent settlement in troubled Virginia, a state named after the Queen's ancestor Elizabeth I.

Maybe the leader writers at The Telegraph know something we don't about the (famously virgin) Elizabeth I? Or maybe they need a lesson from Thomas Hamburger Jnr about the true definition of 'ancestor'? It's a shame he no longer writes his articles on genealogy for the Birkenhead Beagle, as I imagine he would have had a field day with that story, even if he would baulk at Wikipedia's suggestion that our Royal Family are some kind of species of bacteria.