As many of our friends know, Sybille and I have birthdays that are just two days, but several years 🙂 apart. 24th February for Sybille – 26th February for me. Our usual plan is to have a joint celebration on the intervening day, which is what we successfully managed to do last Wednesday. However, sometimes the liturgical calendar conspires against us. The last time our birthdays respectively fell on a Tuesday and a Thursday, as they did this year, was in 2009. Then the intervening day was Ash Wednesday 🙁
Whilst attending the Christmas Party at the British Embassy last December, we met Paul and Michaela, a British/Czech couple who have a business with the interesting name of ‘The Happy Monkey s.r.o.’ Their company run a butchers shop, another butchers shop combined with a bar – Maso a kobliha / Meat and doughnuts, together with an upmarket dégustation restaurant entitled Sansho. As a special treat to mark our birthdays, we booked a table at Sansho for the evening of Wednesday 25th February.
When we arrived at 18.30, surprisingly we were the only customers. However, that soon changed as more people arrived. Apparently most evenings, if you want a table at Sansho, you need to book in advance.
Knowing it was our joint birthdays, Paul kindly presented us with aperitifs – this interesting green cocktail for Sybille and a glass of Prosecco for me. The courses that followed are better illustrated by Sybille’s photographs rather than by my wordy descriptions.
We washed all of this down with a very quaffable rosé wine.
Our dessert, as can be seen in the photograph at the beginning of this post, came complete with two candles. We did blow them out before consuming!
The total cost was around five times what we would normally pay in one of our local bar-restaurants for an evening meal with wine. But the quality of the food, the ambience of the location, and the high standard of service, more than justified the expense.
For this special occasion, Sybille honoured her promise to me when we made our booking, and wore a dress. In return, I wore my suit with a shirt and tie. But I’m afraid I don’t have a photograph to post as Sybille always wants to be behind the camera, rather than in front of it. So instead, here is a photograph from nearly three years ago with Sybille in the same dress and me wearing the same suit and tie, though with a different shirt.
This is a blog post that I started formulating almost two months ago. But for reasons that will be obvious as you read on further, it was only 48 hours ago that I was allowed to speak or write publicly about most of what follows.
The story starts on the morning of Monday 11th January 2010 when I received an email from the British Ambassador to the Czech Republic, Sian MacLeod, alerting me to ‘a visit next weekend by an official group from the UK who would very much like to visit your church’. Her colleague, the Second Secretary Alex Pykett would be in touch with me shortly to make arrangements and she expressed the hope that I would be able to help. I duly replied that I would help in whatever way I could.
A couple of days later, I had a phone call from the Second Secretary. Please could he and the ‘official group from the UK’, meet me at the Church on Saturday 16th January at 2 pm. When I enquired whether this was security related he agreed that it was and that he would be able to tell me more when we met.
Putting two and two together, I realised that what was mind must be some form of Royal Visit. What I did not yet know was who the visitors were to be. Was it to be Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and Philip, Duke of Edinburgh or HRH Prince Charles and HRH Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall? To save the mouthfuls, over the next few days Sybille and I reduced this to either E & P or C & C!
On Saturday 16th January, I travelled into central Prague from the Chaplaincy flat, opened the Church and awaited the arrival of the official party. Just before 2 pm, a car drew up and parked nearby. The driver came across to me and introduced himself. He was an officer of the Czech Secret Service, sent by the Office of the Czech President to meet with the ‘official group from the UK’ to discuss the proposed visit of Prince Charles + Camilla. So it was to be C & C.
Soon afterwards, a minibus pulled up and out stepped the ‘official group from the UK’, led by Alex Pykett the Second Secretary. There were nine or ten people in total and I never got to know who all of them were. Those I did speak with were the Princes’ Private Secretary, his Personal Protection Officer and his Press Secretary, together with the Duchess’ Lady-in-Waiting. We discussed in detail what normally happens at our regular 11am service each Sunday and the special arrangements to be made to allow the Prince and the Duchess to attend and worship with us.
The real shock came when I asked about the date of the proposed visit. I had assumed such visits would be organised several months in advance and presumed we would be talking about September or October 2010. You can therefore imagine my surprise when the reply came that, whilst the exact date had not finally been agreed, it would either be Sunday 14th or Sunday 21st March.
The great emphasis throughout all of our discussions was that the proposed visit had to be kept very hush-hush. This was partly due to the exact dates and arrangements still being sorted out. But sadly, the overriding concern was that of security. By not announcing details of the proposed visit until a few weeks before it is planned to take place, any terrorist would have far less time to organise something. I therefore concluded that at least some of the members of the visiting group who I did not really speak with, were officers of MI5, sussing out all the security implications of such a Royal Visit.
Despite the need for secrecy, I did share the basic details with the Church Council when they met the following day. For depending which Sunday the visit was to take place, it could have had implications regarding other Church activities. But nothing could be made public to the wider congregation until I had the say-so from the British Embassy.
On Friday 5th February, I had a second meeting at Church with Alex Pykett and his diplomatic colleague John Davies. As well as clarifying various practical details regarding the Church service, it was confirmed to me that the date would be Sunday 21st March. I was also told that this was all part of a three country tour with the Prince and the Duchess visiting Poland and Hungary, before arriving in the Czech Republic. The royal couple would be arriving from Budapest the previous day.
I was also promised that towards the end of the following week, there would be an official announcement by the British Embassy about the visit. However, this would still be in very general terms and not including a detailed programme of events. In the meantime it was still very hush-hush – please don’t tell anyone.
It was therefore quite a surprise when the following morning, one of the Churchwardens phoned me saying, “I see the news of the visit is out”. He sent me a link to an article on the website of the Czech newspaper Dnes (Today) with news of the forthcoming royal visit. I soon found an English-language piece on the website of the Czech News Agency CTK. Both articles credited the source of their information as being ‘unnamed diplomatic sources’. I was later informed that the source of the leak to was believed to have been in Hungary!
Finally, late on Thursday 11th February, the promised official announcement was posted on the British Embassy website and a similar press release was made by Clarence House in London. But again, mainly because of security concerns, there was still no detailed programme nor could I yet tell the regular members of the congregation that, as part of the impending royal visit, the Prince and the Duchess would be attending Sunday worship at St. Clements.
On Wednesday 3rd March at 8.30am, I had my third meeting at the Church, this time with the Director of Protocol of the Office of the Czech President, together with several senior officers of the Czech Police. Once more, Alex Pykett was there and helped finalise the necessary security arrangements.
However, the really good news last Wednesday was that later that day, there would be an announcement of the programme for the Royal Visit on the British Embassy website which would in turn give me the green light to tell all the members of the congregation and also be able to publish this blog post!
I have to say that I feel a certain sense of relief that I am finally free to talk openly about the forthcoming Royal Visit. It has occupied quite a bit of my time over these past two months. On quite a number of recent occasions I have had to bite my lip and refrain from saying something in order to maintain the requested secrecy. It hasn’t been easy.
I am also quite encouraged that attending Christian worship is seen as an important ingredient of the visit by the royal couple to the Czech Republic. This is in notable contrast to the visit of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama to Prague in 2009. Instead of attending a Church service, President Obama made his major European speech about promoting a nuclear-free world, standing alongside Prague Castle, but on the morning of Palm Sunday!
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (to give my home country its full official name), does not have a National Day as such. Some of the constituent parts of the UK do have their own special day with the Welsh making much of ‘Dydd Dewi Sant – St. David’s Day’ on 1st March and the Irish, both north and south of the border, celebrating St. Patrick on 17th March.
The nearest we get to a National Day is the Queen’s Official Birthday. This is usually celebrated on the second Saturday of June each year. Queen Elizabeth the Second’s actual birthday is 21st April but she has her official birthday in June in the hope the weather will be better for events put on to mark the occasion, most notably, the Trooping of the Colour ceremony in London.
The occasion of the Queen’s Official Birthday is used by British Embassies in foreign capital cities around the world, as a very good excuse to host a diplomatic reception. So it was that on Thursday 11th June, Her Excellency Linda Duffield CMG, the British Ambassador to the Czech Republic, hosted a Reception marking the official birthday of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, and we were invited to attend!
The British Embassy, like a number of other foreign embassies, is situated in Mala Strana, the ‘Little Town’ or ‘Lesser Town’, an area of wonderful architectural delights that lies immediately below Prague Castle. It occupies a building originally known as Thun Palace which has a history going back to mediaeval times. You can read more about it on the embassy website here.
Having passed the inevitable security check and climbed up several flights of stairs through the embassy building, we arrived in the embassy gardens that lie immediately under the walls of the castle, to be formally welcomed by the ambassador. I had previously had an hour-long meeting with Linda Duffield back in January. But Sybille had never met her before so I introduced her to the ambassador and remarked that as a German citizen, Sybille was surprised to be invited to a reception marking the British monarch’s birthday! In reply the ambassador pointed out that the German ambassador was actually immediately in front of us!
The guest of honour at the reception was the President of the Czech Republic, Václav Klaus. His official residence in Prague Castle effectively overlooks the British Embassy garden and jokes about looking down on the ambassador and her embassy were an inevitable part of his speech. This followed the ambassador’s speech in which she spoke of good Czech – British relations over the 90 years since the first ambassador of the UK to the newly formed nation of Czechoslovakia, presented his letters of appointment to President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk in 1919. The speeches were followed by the playing of ‘God save the Queen’ and the Czech national anthem.
The Reception was an interesting mixture of things British, with Pimms being one of the drinks served, and things Czech, with a large tent where Pilsner Urquell was freely available. Strawberries and cream were served along with cheese from both Britain and elsewhere. Despite several strong gusts of wind, no marquees or gazebos blew over and the rain just about managed to stay away.
When all the guests arrived, we were duly piped in by two Scottish pipers playing the bagpipes. The Reception was officially meant to finish at 7pm. At 7.15pm, those of us still present were given a pertinent reminder that it was time to leave by the same pipers striking up to pipe us out of the embassy garden and down the staircases of the embassy building and back out into Mala Strana.
