Camilla, Her Detractors, and Moving Forward

     A little more than a fortnight following the tragic death of her brother, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall was back on Royal duty last week as she visited military installations in Yorkshire and Staffordshire.

     At RAF Leeming in Yorkshire - of which the Duchess is the Honorary Air Commodore - on May 8th, she opened a new £4.9 million medical center, which provides primary health care as well as rehabilitation to soldiers who have returned from the battlefront.

The Duchess of Cornwall
José Cruz/Agência Brasil via Wikimedia Commons cc

     From there, she flew via helicopter to Whittington in Staffordshire to officially open the Defence Medical Services facility as well as the Defence College of Healthcare Education and Training. It was Families Day, where the staff and their families who will be working there had a look at the new building and turned out in force to see the Duchess. There, she met leading dignitaries as well as members of the community, and visited stalls showcasing activities and amenities of the surrounding towns and villages. Going before the crowds, she said they should "celebrate with pride" the opening of the facility.

     The next day, she was in Oxfordshire to open the £12million University of Oxford’s Botnar Research Center at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Center in Headington, which conducts research into enhancing the treatment of arthritis, osteoporosis, and other bone and joint diseases. She also headed to Helen and Douglas House Hospice - of which she is Patron - where she unveiled a portrait of herself and met with the staff and residents living there.

     It was great to see Camilla out and about after a two week period of mourning for her brother Mark Shand, who died in New York after slipping and hitting his head on a concrete sidewalk. The Duchess was very close to Mark, and this was evidenced when she was seen shedding a tear as she was accompanied by Prince Charles out of the church where the funeral was being held.

     Throughout this period, there was mostly sympathy and respect toward the Duchess for the great loss she suffered. But, as is usual when Camilla is in the news, there was also some disrespectful and frankly disgusting commentary on the web (especially on Twitter) directed at her from people who still exercise prejudice and hold a grudge for her actions during the marriage between Charles and Diana.

     Now, aside from the fact this is all in the past, what on Earth did any of this have to do with a woman grieving over her beloved brother? What did this have to do with present-day circumstances? Absolutely nothing.

Loving Diana need not also mean hating Camilla.
Crisco 1492 via Wikimedia Commons cc

     But it had everything to do with heaping more criticism on Camilla and having an opportunity to bash her for past actions. Indeed, some people made statements sounding like this: "I'll feel sympathy for her when she apologizes for what she did to Diana." Others were more vile and cruel, but they all had the basic message of directly blaming Camilla for Diana's own tragic death in 1997, and some took it a step further by suggesting that this was some form of revenge.

     Needless to say, such statements and claims of revenge are not going to bring Diana back, and they do nothing to help adjusting the idea that Camilla will be Queen of the United Kingdom.

     I should say that I myself have come a long way in my personal views on Camilla. Like many people, I was hostile towards her, holding her responsible for the failure of the Charles-Diana marriage which led to the Paris car crash. But as time has gone on, I have gradually warmed up to her and believe that she will become Queen, and not the Princess Consort (as the Palace keeps insisting will be the case). She has now become fully integrated into the machinery of monarchy and has earned the respect and affection the people through her own brand of regal warmth and openness. She is not a replacement for Diana - no one can replace her, not even the Duchess of Cambridge - but she certainly coming into her own as an asset for the monarchy.

     Probably more importantly, she has helped to provide some comfort and stability in Prince Charles's personal life after years of chaos which notoriously spilled out into the public realm. After nine years (and going), their marriage appears to be a successful and happy one, and one only needs to see them together to understand how well they get on with each other. They compliment and support each other, and on the day of Mark Shand's funeral, the Prince of Wales was seen being in full support of his wife in her moment of grief. 

     But there will always be people who will look upon Camilla unfavorably, and believe that she should not be Queen. There is not much that can be done about them, except for Camilla to continue to work hard at what she does as a member of the Royal family, and to do it well. And some of us simply need to move on and bury the past.

The future King and Queen of Canada on their 2009 Royal tour of the country. 
Ibagli via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)

     In a few weeks time, Charles and Camilla will be head to Canada for a Royal tour, and will continue to earn themselves a place in the hearts and affections of people's across throughout Commonwealth.

     As the Queen gradually hands more of the workload to Charles, he will need Camilla, and we will see more of both of them as time inches forward to his own accession.

Prince Charles and the London Housing Crisis

The Prince of Wales speaking at Buckingham Palace late last year

     As heir to the throne for over sixty years, Prince Charles has sought to be more than a “presence” as suggested by President Richard Nixon in 1970.

     The result is that he as used his position and influence to speak out on issues that are important to him, and has made interventions into public matters like housing and sustainability.

     Yesterday was no different as the Prince of Wales made an impassioned call for more homes to be built in London to help solve the city’s housing crisis. His remarks were made in a speech made upon the release of Housing London: A Mid-Rise Solution, a publication furnished by the Prince’s Foundation for Building Community.

     The Prince warned that rocketing house prices and rents threatened to drive a generation of young people away of the United Kingdom’s capital city at the same time that it has other attributes going for it, such as employment opportunities not found elsewhere. Recently-released official figures showed that the average price for a house in London is £458,000, an increase of 13% in just one year, making it virtually impossible for a young individual to make a substantial down payment (or deposit) on a home in the hope of making affordable mortgage payments over their lifetime.

     On the rental front, the story is not much better. Many of the new rental units that are being built are found in high-rise towers which only the wealthiest individuals can obtain, and much of them are used for investment and not living purposes by foreign nationals. This means that some homes and apartments are unoccupied for long periods of time, whilst the housing market continues a relentless upward trend as people with means continue to buy.

     All of this makes for an unsustainable situation in which most young people are priced out the market, and the ones that can get in often have to spend a majority of their income on rent, leaving few resources to do other activities.

     Prince Charles and his foundation have suggested that the developers should not just build more affordable housing, but that they also ought to move away from building high-rises to building “mid-rises” – buildings about six to eight stories tall and in the character of Georgian manor blocks of the 18th and 19th centuries.

     The report also calls for developments to be of a mixed variety – with private, shared, and public housing built in the same place and around cultural institutions and squares to achieve greater cohesion and a sense of community and belonging amongst the inhabitants. Such communities should also be “walkable” and have public transportation available to achieve what the Prince of Wales has called the “built environment.”

     Inevitably, there will be some republicans who will criticize the Prince for wading into political issue about which he knows nothing.

     However, as with the case of his mother making remarks about the plight of the poor, Charles was simply stating the obvious with regard to the need for affordable housing in London. One cannot read a newspaper in the UK without some mention of the housing shortage, which is indeed a crisis as London and the rest of country continue to grow. The problem is exasperated by wealthy individuals – many of them foreigners – who buy property as investment vehicles, which sends home prices up even further and deprives Londoners of critical housing.

     The city cannot become the exclusive playground and stopover point for the wealthiest individuals in the world. As the capital of the United Kingdom, it ought to be a place where people from throughout the country can live, regardless of their resources – financial or otherwise.

     Prince Charles’s ideas for attempting to rectify this problem are helpful, in my opinion. They make a case for building more housing on a more human scale with the aim of bringing people and communities together. This chimes in with the views of many Londoners who like the new tall towers, but would not want to live in them.

     And with all of the glass towers being thrown up across London, having new buildings in more traditional architectural styles would inject some flavor into the city bringing back some of the scenery for which it has been known. Indeed, the report calls for “more London” in terms of style.

     If these ideas can provide the impetus for public action to achieve affordable and sustainable housing, as well as creating vital communities, then the Prince’s intervention will be a good thing. If anything, it is the fact that he is divorced from the day to day governance of the country – and therefore above the political fray – that gives him the credibility to speak out on such issues, since he is not serving “special interests” or partisan political constituencies. It is better that he use his position to highlight issues and provide solutions on which government can – if it wishes – act.

     One thing for sure, as heir to the throne, he has not been a mere “presence.”

Happy St. David's Day!

Flag of Saint David

     Today is St. David's Day, and it is a national day of celebration in Wales.

     Saint David is the patron saint of Wales - one of the four patron saints of the British – or Anglo-Celtic – Isles (with the other ones being St. Andrew for Scotland, St. Patrick for Ireland, and St. George for England).

Stained-glass window featuring St. David at the Jesus College Chapel at Oxford

     He was born in Wales, and began his ecclesiastical career as a teacher and preacher, and he became widely known throughout the Celtic world. David would go on to found monastic settlements in Brittany, Cornwall, and his native country. There, he established a Celtic monastic community at Glyn Rhosyn in Pembrokeshire, where St. David's Cathedral stands today. Among his well-known miracles was that of causing the ground to rise into a small hill at the spot where he had preached before a large crowd in the town of Llanddewi Brefi, and he eventually became a bishop. St. David lived by example, and had a simple lifestyle which included refraining from meat and alcohol, engaging in prayer, and disavowing personal possessions. 

     At the time of his death on March 1, 589, he was said to be 90-100 years of age, and was buried at the cathedral that bore his name, where a shrine was erected. The shrine was vandalized by Viking invaders, but was rebuilt in 1275, though its decorative elements were stripped during the Protestant reformation.

St. David's Day celebrations at Cardiff Bay

     Commemorations for St. David's Day go back several centuries, but it was not until 2000 that the devolved National Assembly for Wales unanimously voted to make it a public holiday, though it is not a bank holiday where most people officially have the day off. 

     Parades are held throughout Wales in commemoration of St. David's Day, and the largest of these take place in the Welsh capital city of Cardiff, which is usually attended by the monarch of the United Kingdom or the Prince of Wales.

Charles, Prince of Wales on a visit to Wales

     On Friday of this year, Prince Charles visited the Queen's Dragoon Guard's (of which he is Colonel-in-Chief) and watched them conduct training exercises prior to deployment to Afghanistan. He also visited Old Town Hall in Merthyr Tydfil, which is being opened today as an arts and crafts center after an extensive renovation. The visits were made on Friday since St. David's Day falls on a Saturday this year, and the Prince is now spending a private weekend in Wales. 

     In addition, people take part in eisteddfodau - a Welsh festival of literature, music and performance - and some of the Welsh regiments in the British Army conduct a military tattoo. 

     Celebrations of the day often include the use of Welsh emblems, such as the leek and daffodil, as well as the flag bearing the cross of St. David - a gold cross against a black field. In 2012, the shrine of St. David was restored again, and rededicated on the patron saint's day that year.


Photo Credit: Self via Wikimedia Commons cc, Lilo Lil via Wikimedia Commons cc, Peter Broster via Flickr cc