• Visitors can check out the Forum FAQ by clicking this link. You have to register before you can post: click the REGISTER link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below. View our Forum Privacy Policy.
  • Want to receive the latest contracting news and advice straight to your inbox? Sign up to the ContractorUK newsletter here. Every sign up will also be entered into a draw to WIN £100 Amazon vouchers!

Denny or The Duke of Edinburgh

Collapse
X
  •  
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    Denny or The Duke of Edinburgh

    I do not wish to get on her case too much which is why I am making this post in a sort of "once and for all" way. I will agree that a lot of what she says is sensible. The problem is that she submerges any modicums of sensibility in a sea of self righteous victimhood.

    She came to mind whislt I was reading todays "comment" from the sensible Libby Purves (not "perves"). But I cannot think of two people who so perfectly represent two ends of a spectrum.

    Like the Duke, just get on with it
    Sixty years of marriage confer a special wisdom. The husband of the Queen can offer us useful lessons in lifeLibby Purves
    I once had the enviable opportunity to ask the Duke of Edinburgh, on air, whether he had regretted or resented giving up his cherished naval career just one year after getting his first command, simply because his father-in-law died and his wife had to be Queen.

    His answer was to the effect that there is no point (off-air, it would have been “no bloody point”) in thinking about what might have been, because you just have to get on with it.

    It wasn't a political answer. The peppery Duke doesn't do political answers, and has paid the critical price for that often enough. It was a statement of attitude, and one that has kept coming to mind through the past few days of celebration of his 60th wedding anniversary. The brisk energetic pragmatism of it seems to me ever more admirable, and ever more anachronistic. Life throws missiles at you: you duck, or catch them and throw them back, or pick them up and find some use for them. Life is an inexact science and time only works one way. What is, is; what happens, happens. Sometimes you can try to understand why it happened and draw lessons from it, but just as often there is no explanation at all, no useful lesson to be drawn. You just have to get on with it. Start from where you are.

    It is a quality you often notice in these long, long marriages: that ability to adjust to changing circumstances. The times when marriages fail are often times of change. The first baby is born, and the mother gets preoccupied and plump; or perhaps no baby is born and the stress of IVF and arguments over adoption blows the whole thing to pieces. Maybe someone loses their job and gets depressed, or gets a new job and has to ask the spouse to move two hundred miles. A child causes trouble, or simply grows up and leaves, and a bout of depression and sense of empty-nested meaninglessness makes one partner tedious to live with.

    Background
    60 years on,we’re back, old thing
    Royals at diamond wedding service
    Diamond wedding marked in junk
    War will be put to rest for Queen’s anniversary
    Multimedia
    Pictures: Royal Diamond Wedding anniversary

    Or perhaps another potential partner, without any of the problems, appears on the horizon, and one of you bolts for freedom (which often turns out not to be freedom after all). Change is hard to live with, but especially hard if you resent it and look back. It does no good at all to let yourself wish you were still in the Navy, or still young and sexy, or still living in the old house, or richer, or had younger, easier children and a partner with a full head of hair. It won't happen; a better future might, if you work on it. As for the past, it isn't going to change.

    Worst of all is the tendency to look back in blame, and exist in a cloud of “if only” and “we was robbed”. Square the shoulders, get on with it. One of the most admirable examples of this I ever knew was a woman in a prosperous upper-middle-class family who, when her husband's firm suddenly went bust, looked the situation right in

    the eye. While he flailed and wailed she got the house sold, cut up the credit cards and took a clutch of jobs — including cleaning the floor in a pub. She was full of jokes about it, and never blamed him. The

    husband, alas, was less grown-up, retreated into a fantasy of his own continuing importance and finally bolted. But her route was the best one, the most honourable and hopeful.

    The same applies to societies and nations. No bloody point grumbling, as the Duke would say, just get on with it. We have spent too much time recently in communal therapy, gazing at our own navel, apologising for the past or excoriating it. According to our position and views we love to blame every social ill on long-vanished nobs, mineowners, colonists, crusaders, slavers, boarding schools, hippies, architects, trendy teachers, Mrs Thatcher, polluters, whatever. It does no good. Soon it will even be time to stop looking back and blaming everything on Tony Blair, though the self-righteous staring-eyed interviews running on the BBC right now may delay our ability to let that one go.

    Looking back to learn lessons is one thing; looking back to buttress a sense of inevitable gloom and decline is quite another. Historians have the job of showing the past to us clearly, so that we don't repeat mistakes, and that is an admirable thing to do. But history is never an excuse for limpness, self-pity and bad behaviour in the present. You have to start from where you are and make the most of it.

    The Duke of Edinburgh, for all his irascibility and frequent lack of tact, has done this. Himself deprived of adventure and risk and seat-of-the-pants control of his life (and of the frigate HMS Magpie) he found lesser sources of adrenalin in sailing and carriage driving, and founded his awards scheme to enable the rising generations to feel that buzz and grow in confidence. Just turned 30, he was faced with a compulsory job for which he was not remotely suited by nature: a ceremonial and supporting role alongside a female constitutional monarch. Scoffers will say the Royal family is “pampered”, but if they are honest even scoffers must admit that no amount of Ruritanian titles, gold braid and valets could compensate for such loss of control and choice in their own life.

    Yes, he married the job; but he had every right to expect twenty years of comparative freedom before the consort role kicked in. George VI was only 56, his father made it to 70 and his grandmother to 80. But the Duke refuses, to this day, to moan about it. And he remains married, smiling, interested, and faithful to the strange job we foisted on him. Raise a glass to him today.


    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/com...cle2902814.ece
    Let us not forget EU open doors immigration benefits IT contractors more than anyone

    #2
    Yawn
    Me, me, me...

    Comment


      #3
      Originally posted by Cliphead View Post
      Yawn
      Twat

      Comment


        #4
        Originally posted by Churchill View Post
        Twat
        Ball sniffer
        Me, me, me...

        Comment


          #5
          Originally posted by Cliphead View Post
          Ball sniffer
          Jealous bastard!

          Comment


            #6
            Have a huge amount of time for Libby Purves, much less so for DoE, but the idea of not blaming and moving on is a good one ... especially since she (LP) must have had a really sh*tty time of things recently.

            Comment


              #7
              Not sure where Denny fits in to this? I agree that the EB, IR35 etc views are more extreme than most but I never really got a sense of victim hood in her posts. I guess I could re-read them all but I'm not goiing to.

              I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment of the article and definitely think that our society is all to quick to point blame, rather than looking to move forward and 'get on with it'. Although I have to say that the DoE's wife becoming Queen and therefore shortening his military career is hardly the greatest challenge one can face.

              Comment


                #8
                Some might say of the DoE, it must be hard being a emasculated parasite and others say we should doft our caps and know our place.
                The court heard Darren Upton had written a letter to Judge Sally Cahill QC saying he wasn’t “a typical inmate of prison”.

                But the judge said: “That simply demonstrates your arrogance continues. You are typical. Inmates of prison are people who are dishonest. You are a thoroughly dishonestly man motivated by your own selfish greed.”

                Comment


                  #9
                  Wasn't there a story some years ago about the DoE and one of HM hand maidens?
                  How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Originally posted by Troll View Post
                    Wasn't there a story some years ago about the DoE and one of HM hand maidens?
                    Thinking about this some more.... this could be seen as a 'perk' of the job... lots of top toff totty floating around, HM busy with affairs of State
                    I would certainly abuse my position...and as long as it was discrete
                    How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think

                    Comment

                    Working...
                    X