So the news is out - Queen and Adam Lambert are to open the Queen's Platinum Jubilee on the first weekend in June. I had a feeling in my blood that they would be there. Maybe Brian had dropped a few hints too - yes, I think he probably did! Most likely that's one you can see in his recent video, 'On My Way Up', when today's Bri dresses up in the same coat as in the 2002 rooftop performance. Also, prior to that, there was an episode of 'Queen the Greatest' towards the end of that series dealing with the 2002 Party at the Palace i that seemed a little out of sync chronologically; it still makes me wonder. Or maybe it had nothing to do with it. But the seed was planted in my mind at that point and never left it.
I can lay claim to having my life punctuated by two past Jubilees. Let's go back to the one twenty-five years prior to 2002: in 1977. It was then, on the occasion of the queen's Silver Jubilee, that I, along with some schoolfriends, had a vantage point next to St. Paul's Cathedral to watch the comings and goings. This was a privileged position we were granted through our school, the nearby City of London School for Girls. The only real significance of this is the year itself, actually. Only two months later, I, aged 15, would lose my mother, aged 49, to the cancer she'd been stricken by for the previous eighteen months.
In 2002, I didn't see Brian's performance at the time it happened. This was no doubt because I was extremely busy finishing my teacher training course. I was living in Kent at the time and based at a school called Bullers Wood in Orpington, which previous teacher-trainees had dubbed 'Bullies' Wood'. Yes, I was badly bullied by teachers who should have been mentoring me. There were, surely, other ways of doing this. If they thought that I wasn't up to the job in any aspect, they could've told me to my face. True, I've no doubt I was quite unlikeable - I overcompensated for my lack of self-esteem, rather trying to hide it with a show of apparent overconfidence. The truth was that I was trying to gain the self-confidence I'd lacked for so long, and had made some inroads into doing so - but these things are rarely linear. I'd taken a big knock in my previous job at the bank - passed over for a promotion when I'd previously been pretty much in my element. My marriage had broken down too, which didn't help. In a way, things had fallen to pieces in my life all over again by 2002: 1977 rather repeating itself. Nonetheless, I'd decided to become a teacher as a careet change in middle age and was determined to succeed. Yet I inevitably had my own insecurities about the decision.
As will be the case this year, the Golden Jubilee in 2002 was a bank holiday weekend in the UK and I no doubt wanted to take advantage of this in order by taking my daughter out on the days off. We probably went down Chatham Dockyard to enjoy the holiday entertainment. So that was how I completely missed the Party at the Palace broadcast at the time. In fact, I didn't catch up with it until December, when it was on one of those review shows that are broadcast to round off the year. What happened then was a life-changing experience, which I've handled in my book, 'Bohemia Place'. All I can say that, by the end of Brian's rendition of 'God Save the Queen', I'd been sent back to that previous Jubilee year, 1977, and before...I've explained why in the book.
Now I live in Germany so I wonder if this year's Platinum Jubilee performance by Queen and Adam Lambert will hold anything special at all. I can't see any such thing on the horizon, except that I hope to write about the event, along with the two Queen and Adam Lambert concerts I'm seeing in Germany later this month, even though it's unlikely that anyone will read them. But life has a habit of throwing up surprises...so you never know!
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