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October 10, 2004
Queen opens Holyrood
The Queen opened the Scottish Parliament yesterday and a lot of people had a lot of fun, Scotland’s poet laureate Edwin Morgan said the Queen shouldn’t be there. Sir Sean Connery thought Tony Blair should have been there, and folksinger Eddi Reader would have been happy with a double booking with the republican counter-ceremony on Calton Hill.
Gawking at people in funny clothes has never appealed to me. I didn’t go and I wasn’t surprised to hear that few other people went. After all, the parliamentary doors are already open, and the building isn’t actually finished. The Queen’s opening was a formality to be gone through at some arbitrary point.
The best description of the event was from Bill Jamieson, the Executive Editor of the Scotsman: “I waited in a crowd one deep near the bottom of the Canongate. … First down was an oompah band that could have been hired for a garden centre opening in Surbiton… .”
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/3727526.stm
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/3731882.stm
news.scotsman.com/scotland.cfm?id=1180942004
scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1179492004
Posted by Simon Holledge at October 10, 2004 03:21 PM