The Prince took a walk on Snowdon
Camilla Parker Bowles made her first
appearance along side Prince Charles in Wales
when the couple attended a concert.
The Prince is on his annual tour of Wales and
there had been much speculation that his
long-term companion Mrs Parker Bowles had
joined him at the secluded house near
Welshpool where he was staying.
On Saturday night she accompanied him to a
private concert at Gregynog Hall near
Newtown.
The couple sped into the grounds of the hall in
a cortege of cars around 19.20 BST.
Camilla, wearing a
cream outfit with a
peach-coloured wrap,
sat bedside the Prince,
who waved to the
crowds gathered
outside the main
entrance.
The concert, which
featured the best of
Welsh music, was a
strictly private event
with invited guests
only.
The couple are staying at the nearby Vaynor
Park near Welshpool, but Mrs Parker Bowles
has not accompanied the Prince on any of his
official engagements.
On Friday he opened the National Botanical
Garden of Wales at Llanarthne in
Carmarthenshire.
In his first engagement on Saturday the Prince
toured Machynlleth where pensioner John Eliss
asked him to deliver some 100th birthday cards
to the Queen Mother.
Then the Prince
travelled to Caernarfon
Castle, the scene of
his investiture more
than 30 years ago.
There he performed the
official opening of the
Regimental Museum of
the Welsh Fusiliers.
Later the Prince took
to the mountainside of
Snowdon to see
first-hand work on one
of his favourite projects.
He viewed work taking place on the Hafod y
Llan estate, above Beddgelert, which was
bought for the nation by the National Trust
two years ago, after Welsh actor Sir Anthony
Hopkins donated £1m to the appeal.
Access
The appeal raised the asking price of £3.65m in
only 87 days, including a donation from the
Prince.
Aides said the Prince had expressed a wish to
see for himself work taking place on the land,
which forms about one-third of the Snowdon
range.
The purchase by the National Trust ensured
continued public access to large parts of
Snowdon.
National Trust property manager for the area
Richard Neale accompanied the Prince as he
climbed to around 1,000ft on the mountainside.
"He is a farmer and knows the problems facing
farmers," Mr Neale said.
On his way the Prince stopped to chat to four
estate workers carring out repairs to a dry
stone wall before returning to farm buildings to
watch a demonstration of sheep shearing.
On Monday, the final day of his Welsh tour,
Prince Charles is due to open the Royal Welsh
Show at Llanelwedd, Builth Wells.
~*~
Princess 'Pushy' proclaims her pedigree(Electronic Telegraph)
By Sean O'Neill
PRINCESS MICHAEL of Kent has claimed that her poor public image is the
deliberate creation of a media which dislikes her because she is "foreign and
Catholic".
In a rare magazine interview, the princess complains
that the laws of succession, which forbid a Roman
Catholic acceding to the throne, are old-fashioned
and discriminatory. She adds that, although born a
commoner, she has more royal blood than anyone
who has married into the Royal Family since Prince
Philip married the Queen in 1947.
Princess Michael, who was christened
Marie-Christine von Reibnitz when born in Bohemia
in 1945, rails against her media nickname, Princess
Pushy, and reports that she claims to be "more royal
than the Royals". The interview, in W, an American
fashion magazine, was given to promote her new role
as "special correspondent" for BestSelections, an
upmarket shopping web site.
In the interview, conducted at her apartment in Kensington Palace, she said
the custom for the Royal Family to ignore inaccurate stories had ended and
she wanted to rebut some old stories. The suggestion that she is "more royal
than the Royals" was, the princess said, a distortion of a humorous story told
by the late Lord Mountbatten who undertook the task of selling to the Queen
the idea of a Catholic divorcee marrying into the Royal Family.
She said: "I was not born a royal highness so, technically, I am a commoner
but I happen to have a lot of royal blood. So he was telling the Queen about
my grand ancestry, about how I was descended from Charlemagne, this king,
that king, this queen. Mountbatten was a genealogist, that was one of his
hobbies. So he laid it on a bit thick until she finally turned to him and said,
'Well, Dickie, she sounds a bit too grand for us'.
"He thought that was terribly funny. So he told us, he told everybody. That
got turned into my being grand this way, toffee nose, la-de-dah grand. It was
Mountbatten thinking he was painting a beautiful portrait of me. But before
you knew it, the papers said I was 'more royal than the Royals'."
Princess Michael, who married her husband in 1978, a year after the end of
her first marriage, said there was some truth in the suggestion that she was
from a more royal bloodline than other members of the family. She added:
"The fact is, of those who have married into the family since Prince Philip, I
had more royal blood. It's just a genealogical thing, just a fact of life."
She then tackled the label Princess Pushy, which is alleged to have been
coined by the Princess Royal. She said: "It comes up all the time but nobody
has ever given an incident of where I have pushed. We're not very social. We
don't go out that much. But they had to put a handle on me. I guess someone
said, 'She pushed her way into this family'. I didn't. I held out for years,
refusing to marry."
The princess said that Lord Mountbatten had to talk her into the idea of
marriage before he set about persuading the Queen. "I knew [Prince Michael]
for many years. I wasn't remotely interested in marrying him until one day
Lord Mountbatten said to me, 'Why don't you marry that man? He's
obviously crazy about you'. Three years later I did marry him. But I thought
long and hard about it."
The princess added that her Roman Catholic upbringing had always been an
obstacle to her being accepted in England and in the Royal Family. Prince
Michael, who had been eighth in line to the throne, lost his right of succession
when he married her. The couple's children, Lord Frederick and Lady
Gabriella, who were brought up in the Church of England, are 29th and 30th
in line.
Princess Michael said: "I came from a Catholic country. I'm not sure I should
be saying this . . . this country has shed a lot of blood over many centuries
over this issue. In the Royal Family you can't marry a Catholic by law by an
Act of 1701 that is still on the statute books. They can marry a Moonie, a
Seventh Day Adventist, a Scientologist, a Muslim.
"Some old laws still apply very well today. But a law that no member of the
Royal Family can marry a Catholic? That strikes me as being just a little bit
too old-fashioned. It's against the law to discriminate against Catholics, but
the family is different."
Prince and Princess Michael are not on the Civil List and both work. The
prince is a businessman. The princess has written two well-received historical
books and lectures around the world in addition to compiling her internet
shopping column.
~*~
On the beach with Wills (The Guardian)
Anna Stothard
Last week, I tried to join a cult. The
members surface together for one week a
year in a tiny village in Cornwall, just
across the River Camel from Padstow.
They collect at 10pm at a pub called the
Mariners and then at midnight at a nearby
bay.
All the members are very young, very
beautiful and very élite. Prince William is
there, hiding under his cap, while Harry
bounces around the beach chatting up
pretty girls. Tatler boys wander around,
kissing girls on the forehead and asking
whether they would like to get 'better
acquainted', while mini-Sloanes who aren't
keen on outdoor living try to keep fires
going by contributing bus tickets,
cigarette packets and seaweed.
It is possible for someone simply to
chance upon these secret meeting
places, but most of these cultists are part
of the underground chain of information
called public-school life. All
boarding-school kids seem to know each
other, so secret codes and meeting
places travel fast. There is only a small
stretch of beach where the party happens,
only one pub where everybody meets. The
only chat up line is: 'I go to Eton/ Harrow/
Ampleforth; where do you go?' The only
way to see where you are walking is by
the light of Nokia mobiles.
There were three types of people in
Cornwall last week: the core boarding-
school cult, then there's day-school
people like me on the fringe and finally the
locals, the 'real' surfers. They turned out
to be quite an attraction, but we had to
hurry them awaywhen they started calling
the Sloanes 'Yahs' and stealing copies of
Horse and Hound to burn on the fire.
The Sloanes are like a cabaret to watch.
Hundreds of immaculately-dressed
teenagers trekked down this perfect
Cornwall beach with no visible goal in
sight. At midnight low tide, their stage is
miles of slightly wet, flat beach. Armed
with pastel-coloured pashminas and
headscarves, they walked as if they had
to be at the King's Road by 9.30. There is
a murmur of mellow, stoned, posh voices
saying things like, 'Quick ,Tatiana,
Arthur's got reception! Let's see which
bonfire Raury is at.'Of course, we followed
them each night and tried to blend in. We
pretended we were boarding-school girls
and we just kept 'forgetting' to bring our
Sloane accessories. We tried to avoid the
question of where we were sleeping. Every
time we mentioned our seven-person
caravan, where 10 of us were staying,
they either keeled over from 'simply
bloody hysterical' jokes about the joys of
intimate holidays or asked us for detailed
instructions on how to get there.
We sat around, sociably chatting to
people at their fires. There were CD
players and beautiful guitar music. There
were police around, but I've never met
better natured people in uniform.
Sweet-smelling smoke hung in clouds
over the beach but when the police came
by, they would say things like: 'Do be
careful with that bonfire.'
It doesn't matter where people sleep in
this cult. If you put on an accent and
know somebody who somebody else went
to pre-school with or is in the same house
as someone at Eton, then you've got a
place to sleep. As long as you can pass
on some piece of gossip about who has
had sex with whom, then you might even
get a pillow and duvet.
People sleep in their Mercedes or Daddy's
Ferrari. The more adventurous fall asleep
on the sand. Nobody wakes up until
midday and then the party begins again.
William is king of this cult, even though
his is a difficult part to play. He tries to
blend into the crowd, sitting in a baseball
cap surrounded by his friends. Yet all
events seem to revolve around him. Harry
is everywhere at once, being cheeky and
amusing, while his bodyguard shifts
neurotically nearby. They both seemed
fairly normal.
But then again, I'm slightly confused by
what normal is, having spent a week with
the best-dressed, thinnest, richest
teenagers in England. The princes were,
in the context of the the beach, quite
normal.