“They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace, Christopher Robin went down with Alice." We looked for the King, but he never came.” “Well, God take care of him, all the same,” Says Alice. AA Milne’s whimsy was first published in 1924, but 101 years on, it strikes a contemporary note. Will a King (or a Queen) ever again be “in” at Buckingham Palace? Is its role as the royal home about to be quietly consigned to history?
Some are even asking if the huge monolithic structure at the heart of London has a royal future at all. The reasons for the question marks almost visibly fluttering from the palace flagpole are twofold.
Firstly, there are currently no royals of any rank living there. That’s because it’s in the throes of a massive ten-year restoration, not due to be completed until at least 2027. And we all know what builders’ predictions are like, don’t we?
Even if the work finishes somewhere close to deadline, King Charles will be pushing 80. William, meanwhile, will be cruising through his mid-40s – and all the signs are that Buckingham Palace stands no chance whatsoever of becoming his family home when he eventually accedes the throne.
William and Kate have made it clear that the forthcoming move to their “forever home”, eight-bedroom Forest Lodge in a quiet corner of Windsor Great Park, is exactly that – permanent. Even when William becomes King, they intend to stay there with their children. No draughty old Buckingham Palace for them. And who can blame them? Even once the crumbling residence has been rewired, replastered and redecorated, it will surely remain a peculiarly soulless, impersonal place.
So what will be the point of it? Should it be sold for the nation? Who’d buy it? A billion-pound hotel chain, perhaps. There’d be no shortage of well-heeled tourists willing to pay top dollar to spend a night or two under such an iconic roof. Even if it still leaks.
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Thank God science can’t answer EVERY question, even in these dawning days of artificial intelligence. We need a bit of mystery in the world. So I was delighted to read this week that even the foremost experts on evolution STILL don’t know why the zebra got its stripes.
“We can fly to the moon... we can do incredible things... but we can’t work out why zebras are striped! It’s SO intriguing,” Hamish Ireland from the University of Edinburgh said this week.
There are theories, naturally. One is that the stripes confuse biting flies – researchers dressed in zebra coats report being left alone by them. But don’t the markings also make zebras more visible to predators? “If there are lions about, you don’t worry about being bitten by a fly,” says Ireland wryly.
There’s an opposing theory that the stripes are “dazzle camouflage”, confusing lions for long enough for the zebra to run away. But if that’s true, why haven’t any other animals in the food chain evolved stripes too? Traditional African legend says the first zebra fell into a fire and the burning sticks left the stripe marks.
Sounds as good to me as anything our scientists can come up with.
