Bad parent that I am, while Elaine went to Hania’s thirtieth birthday party, I found myself sitting in tropically warm, St James’s Palace, listening to Prince Charles on the Future – the latest Dimbleby Lecture.
While waiting under the Palace portico, I bumped into David Goodhart of our downstairs neighbours, Prospect magazine, who noted that 2 Bloomsbury Place was well represented. Later, sitting next to Jonathon Porritt in the audience, I wasn’t aware that we were being filmed, but very shortly after got a number of emails from people who had spotted me/us.
Sympathised with much of the speech, though at times felt it was uncomfortably self-referential, when the Prince is actually part of a much larger, non-HRH-branded set of movements. It also felt slightly weird to be lectured on the need to move beyond materialism and consumerism in a setting of such extraordinary opulence.
Overall, however, we are privileged to have him as a champion of these wonderfully diverse issues and causes, all of which – as he noted – are struggling to move from the fringes to the mainstream.
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