Buckingham Palace, 14th July

I realise this is rather old news, and that Richard has already written about his and Anne's visit to the Garden Party on 21st July, but it's still worth me sharing something about our experience on 14th July. We went as a party of Poxons, Waltons and Gambles - and a fine looking group we were! We met for lunch at the Oxford and Cambridge Club in Pall Mall and then made our way round to the Palace, where we discovered we were not the only people to have been invited.

The whole afternoon was very pleasant and the weather was on our side. The Grenadier Guards Band played tunes from Les Miserables and also a very impressive variation on Bach's D minor toccata. Whilst we did not meet any members of the Royal Family, we did meet Fiona Holmes, one of the Youth Conference representatives to our Wolverhampton Conference, who was on stewarding duty at the Palace with the Girls Brigade. We also met the Archbishop of Canterbury and I had a brief and unexpected reunion with Michael Langrish, the Bishop of Exeter. He and I were students at Cambridge (he at Ridley Hall and I at Wesley House) in the early 1970s.