Tuesday, December 10, 2019

Mummy's favourite

The other day, when I mentioned Prince Andrew in this post, his name was followed (inexplicaby, to Americans) by a veritable alphabet soup of letters, specifically:

KG, GCVO, CD, ADC(P)

These may be obvious to any stiff-upper-lipped Brit, but I shall now reveal to the rest of the world just what the heck all that stuff means.

They are his medals.

One by one, they are:
  • KG - Knight of the Garter
  • GCVO - Grand Commander of the (Royal) Victorian Order
  • CD - Best as I can figure out, the Canadian Decoration
  • ADC(P) - Aide-de-camp (personal) to the sovereign

According to the Daily Mail (a staid, demure publication not unlike our own Wall Street Journal or New York Times)...


...Prince Andrew actually has (or had, as of 2011) seven medals. The others are the South Atlantic Campaign Medal (Falklands War), the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Medal, the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal (given to Royal Family and trusted members of her household), and the New Zealand Commemoration Medal (1990). The Canadian Decoration mentioned in the earlier list was awarded in 2001.

You can read about them, and other fascinating stuff about the royal family, here.

Please do. There are a couple of lovely photos of the Queen when she was younger. The photos of Andrew are a bit bewildering. In one he is positively beaming, but in another he is glaring ominously at the camera. Perhaps he is thinking of his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, or wishing he were somewhere more pleasant, like a private island in the Caribbean.

7 comments:

  1. Oh what a description of The Daily Mail! The online version makes interesting reading. The venom in the political comments for one thing is incredible, but I like to look for the jokey comments. For example, today there is an article about a man who received a testicle transplant from his twin brother. The comments include: "this is nuts"; "if they were identicle twins there would not be a vas deferens between them", "keeping the family jewels in the family" "what, you can transplant those? I'm going to see if I can have a 3rd one fitted". You get the idea.

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    1. Tasker, (if I may call you Tasker), the Daily Mail is more like the New York Daily News or The New York Post or even, God help us all, The National Enquirer than either of the august publications I mentioned in the post.

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  2. Yes, those initialisms are a bit of a puzzle to us across the pond. By the way I love that poem in your side bar, about lost youth.

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    1. Terra, nice to hear from you. The poem in the sidebar is by Neil Theasby of Sheffield, England, who blogs under the name Yorkshire Pudding. His blog URL is beefgravy.blogspot.com

      I see from your profile that you are in Santa Cruz, California. I spent a week there back in the 1980s and it is a very pleasant place. Some friends in their sixties here in Georgia, John and Patti Cornelius, are from there.

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  3. I assume, I hope that I assume, that you comment describing the Daily Mail was either ironic or sarcastic. I regret that it was far from accurate.

    Our rather curious orders of merit include the Order of St. Michael. Senior civil servants sometimes are so bestowed:

    CMG: Companion
    KCMG: Knight Commander
    GCMG: Knight Grand Cross

    In the satirical and humorous programme on UK TV years ago called 'Yes Minister' they were referred to as:

    CMG = Call Me God
    KCMG = Kings Call Me God
    GCMG = God Calls Me God.





    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Graham, to prove that I was being sarcastic, see my reply to Tasker Dunham above. Again, I thought it was fairly obvious. Maybe subtlety does not work in the Outer Hebrides.

      Your revelations from 'Yes Minister' are too funny!



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    2. It looked like irony to me but I thought that Americans didn't do irony. I now know better.

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<b>Always true to you, darlin’, in my fashion</b>

We are bombarded daily by abbreviations in everyday life, abbreviations that are never explained, only assumed to be understood by everyone...