CAKE during the tea interval is almost as much a part of Test Match Special as an England collapse.
Usually it comes from a Mrs Rostron of Wantage or a Mrs Armstrong of Devizes. Today it will be provided by Mrs Windsor of Windsor as the Queen visits the first day of the Lord's Test against Australia.
Her chunky Dundee cake, baked in the kitchens of Buckingham Palace, will be presented to members of the Radio 4 team to celebrate 40 years of Ashes commentary.
The cake, weighing 5lb, is adorned with the number 40 picked out in almonds.
On hand to devour it will be the commentators Jonathan Agnew, Henry Blofeld and Christopher Martin-Jenkins, the programme's producer, Peter Baxter, and the scorer Bill Frindall, nicknamed "the Bearded Wonder".
Mr Baxter said that he and his team were delighted by the gesture.
He said: "We are more accustomed to thanking Mrs Nora Suggs, of 2 Railway Cottages, for a delicious jam sponge. At first we thought it was a wind-up, but it really is a tremendous honour and we are absolutely bowled over."
Cake eating reached its peak in the days of the late Brian Johnston, occupying a pivotal role in the Test Match Special culture, with appalling schoolboy puns and double entendres.
When the programme entered the computer age, with broadcasts on the internet, the cakes went with it.
Agnew once announced his e-mail address and started receiving "virtual cakes" from listeners.
He said: "I am a great fan of technology, but pictures of cakes are not quite as good as the real thing."
With England trailing Australia in the series, having lost the first Test at Edgbaston, the Queen is due to meet players from both sides during tea, as well as the Test Match Special team.
Holding the fort back in the commentary box is expected to be Tim Lane, of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation - an avowed republican.
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Home at last in the ancestral palace (UK Times)
BY JOHN PHILLIPS IN BELGRADE AND MICHAEL BINYON
CROWN Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia was “finally home” yesterday, his first day in the royal palace from which his father was expelled by the Nazis 60 years ago.
“This opens a new epoch for my family,” the 56-year-old heir to the Yugoslav throne said in the Stari Dvor (Old Palace). The federal authorities have given him the use of the mansion in a sprawling compound in the Belgrade suburb of Dedinje, together with the neighbouring Beli Dvor (White Palace).
The Crown Prince’s homecoming has been long delayed by the turbulence in his country and outspoken hostility from Slobodan Milosevic. It was only after the fall of the former President that his citizenship and property rights were restored. In an emotional ceremony at his birthplace — Claridge’s, in London — in March, Zorin Zivkovic, the Interior Minister, handed over his passport and cleared the way for him to reclaim the palaces.
Sitting under a 17th-century Poussin landscape in the main reception salon with his Greek wife, Princess Katherine, yesterday, the Crown Prince promised to dedicate himself to his homeland. “We are a people’s monarchy,” he said. “The monarchy is alive because we are alive. It is not very important if the crown is restored or not. What is important to is to crown Yugoslavia with jobs.”
He had spent much of the previous 24 hours trying to discover features of the Serbo-Byzantine building that matched the descriptions recounted to him by his father, King Peter II, during their years of exile under communism.
“Just outside the front door is a thatched cottage where my father was given lessons by a tutor who went on to be a British Ambassador,” he said. “None of my family has been here since 1941.”
His wife described the moving moment when her husband, born in 1945, entered the palace for the first time. “He said he wished his father was alive to see this day,” she said. “He became very emotional, just like when he was given back his Yugoslav nationality.
“He said: ‘I am finally home. I am glad that my children don’t have to wait so long to live in the home of their ancestors and can grow up with their people, live with them and help them.’ ”
The return to the palace had not come a moment too soon. “Alexander’s father died when he was 47 from a broken heart, wanting to go home to his people. So I am glad that my husband does not have to follow that example.”
Most monarchs exiled in London during the war returned to palaces that had been occupied by the Germans, looted and partly damaged, but those from the Balkans were never able to go back. Communist governments imposed by Stalin proclaimed republics and rigged the ballots.
In Yugoslavia Marshal Tito, the former partisan leader and originally one of Stalin’s most hardline followers, took over the Karadjordjevic family’s palaces. They, in turn, were taken over by Mr Milosevic, who used the White Palace as a working residence before he was overthrown in October.
“Milosevic does not exist for us,” Princess Katherine said. “He has gone and we have spent too much time talking about him. It is a new beginning now.”