It was to be a great occasion at the Tenpasenta Church estate on Saturday the 7th of June 2008, but it nearly never happened.
We had invited Her Majesty The Queen Mother to officially open our newly built public facilities, unfortunately due to some misunderstanding or other she was unavailable, however we were told her daughter insisted on stepping in as she loved public functions. Although Princess Margaret would not have been our first choice because of the recent clamp down on smoking in public, we were glad she was coming. Yet again we were let down by the Royal family, two days before the opening we were informed that Princess Margaret was never going to be be coming because she had a lengthy appointment at the King George VI Memorial Chapel in Windsor. We were about to phone Rod Hull and Emu to see if they were free when we got a call from Buckingham Palace, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II had confirmed her appointment to visit the Tenpasenta Church and open our new facilities, we were very pleased indeed, it meant we didn't need to re-print our "Royal opening" flyers and posters, we were a bit worried about how that Emu would have behaved anyway.
With the name Queen in her title we knew she must be high up in the Royal family, even though just a grade II.
The visit was on.

The day began early with the arrival of several old men in equally old uniforms, we didn't know who they were at first, but after one let slip that he always follows the Queen on official engagements, it became clear that they were Royal fanatics. The vicar moved them out of sight by pretending the Queen was on her way to our Premier Church which is around the back, how we laughed when we found them still standing there at 9pm.
We believe these people deserve contempt, there was a TV programme about them once telling how they hang about the Royals with their cameras and flags, and these silly disguises didn't fool us for a minute.

The Queen's Guards spent their day standing about in our V.I.P. car park.
They have a funny idea of guarding someone, they just stood about holding their swords, as another one shouted in some strange abbreviated language and then they stamped their feet, Bizarre.
I feel that these guardsman could have been trainees, I saw them in London when I was a kid, and I'm sure they were on horses, or maybe the horses were all dead by now, it was thirty years ago, I must look up the life expectancy of horses on Wikipedia.
They gave the impression that it gets verylonely back at their barracks, one told me that they like to polish their helmets at least twice a day and sometimes do each others to break the boredom, it sounded just like a Catholic school, or maybe polishing helmets isn't the euphanism I thought it was.

There was the customary two hour walkabout where she meets a selection of the better looking member's of the Southampton public (not many). Strangly enough the only people to meet the Queen were those who had paid our spur of the moment £20 entry fee to get in.
We're not being funny but time waits for no man, and Brian had several stiff's to process before it got dark, and she could have walked a bit faster.
Her Majesty collected thousands of flowers from simple minded folk, and then donated them to us, we then sold them from our Sunday market stall and our Funeral shop and made a fair few quid, which was nice.
We noticed that several sailors had gate crashed the estate and were "Queen side", we are currently trying to track down H.M.S. Kissmequick, but don't think they were a security risk to the vicarage.

The spectacular fly past by the Red Devils scared half of the crowd shitless as nobody told us they were coming, we feel that it's about time they updated their planes as these left terrible trails of smoke, our premium crematorium has to meet very strict EU emissions, these 9 jets put that to cock in twenty seconds.

We spotted an old man loitering outside our vicarage, he could have been an undercover security officer as he arrived with the Queen and was very familiar with the guardsmen, I guess it's better than working for B&Q, he looked a right misery so we kept him away from the Queen, nothing worse than some unknown bloke ruining peoples Royal photo's. For an old man he exercised a sharp wit, insulting our ethnic staff in a way that went right over their slanty eyed heads. He even sampled a selection of Gordon's gin before moving on, what we are going to tell Gordon when he gets back I don't know.

Her Majesty was keen to visit the crematorium and discover how common people were disposed of, however she turned down the offer of some freshly toasted crumpets, which was a shame as we had kept that cremator on a high heat just for her. She proceeded through the crematorium looking agitated and asking several people if they had seen Prince Philip, this was very sad for us to see, we were not informed about her advanced Alzheimer's, forgetting a loved ones death especially after so many years must be a real drain on her staff and her only son William.