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Posted Wednesday, August 29, 2007
But marmalade is tasty, if it's very thickly spread.

WHAT child of my generation did not learn poems like these by heart...?

The King's Breakfast

THE King asked
The Queen, and
The Queen asked
The Dairymaid:
"Could we have some butter for
The Royal slice of bread?"
The Queen asked the Dairymaid,
The Dairymaid
Said, "Certainly,
I'll go and tell the cow
Now
Before she goes to bed."

The Dairymaid
She curtsied,
And went and told the Alderney:
"Don't forget the butter for
The Royal slice of bread."

The Alderney said sleepily:
"You'd better tell
His Majesty
That many people nowadays
Like marmalade
Instead."

The Dairymaid
Said "Fancy!"
And went to
Her Majesty.
She curtsied to the Queen, and
She turned a little red:
"Excuse me,
Your Majesty,
For taking of
The liberty,
But marmalade is tasty, if
It's very
Thickly
Spread."

The Queen said
"Oh!"
And went to his Majesty:
"Talking of the butter for
The royal slice of bread,
Many people
Think that
Marmalade
Is nicer.
Would you like to try a little
Marmalade
Instead?"

The King said,
"Bother!"
And then he said,
"Oh, deary me!"
The King sobbed, "Oh, deary me!"
And went back to bed.
"Nobody,"
He whimpered,
"Could call me
A fussy man;
I only want
A little bit
Of butter for
My bread!"

The Queen said,
"There, there!"
And went to
The Dairymaid.
The Dairymaid
Said, "There, there!"
And went to the shed.
The cow said,
"There, there!
I didn't really
Mean it;
Here's milk for his porringer
And butter for his bread."

The queen took the butter
And brought it to
His Majesty.
The King said
"Butter, eh?"
And bounced out of bed.
"Nobody," he said,
As he kissed her
Tenderly,
"Nobody," he said,
As he slid down
The banisters,
"Nobody,
My darling,
Could call me
A fussy man -
BUT
I do like a little bit of butter to my bread!"
-- A. A. Milne
August 29, 2007 (Wednesday)
Madrid (Spain)
I AM told that under the crude heading, "Queen's neighbour" a columnist in The Sunday Telegraph, London, has reported:
THE Queen is unlikely to be amused to learn that she has a new neighbour in Windsor: David Irving, the historian who was jailed for denying the Holocaust.
Irving, who has been renting in central London since his Mayfair flat was repossessed after he was declared bankrupt in 2002, has found a "secluded and ancient house" a stone's throw from the Queen's retreat.
It's also quiet. "Because it's so close to the castle, the planes taking off from Heathrow all veer away to north and south, and gain altitude rapidly to avoid disturbing Her Majesty's royal marmalade," he says. "I waited and watched for an hour a few days ago to check."
The journalist seems to have forgotten that since all my possessions were seized in 2002, I resided in somewhat solitary quarters in Vienna for, ahem, a while, as a result of expressing the wrong opinions in 1989. The Telegraph newspapers have however now become much more careful about libelling me, after their suggestion that I had squirreled away our assets to cheat creditors turned out to have no foundation whatever. Under Conrad Black (the empty glove-puppet whose hands were controlled by Henry Kissinger, Richard Perle and other Hollinger-board members of the same ilk) they became much less objective, and more philo-Semitic, than previously. The newspaper and its hapless journalists applauded every bomb that fell on Lebanese civilians last summer.
I TAKE it incidentally that the Telegraph journalist was not brought up on the A A Milne poem, "The King's Breakfast," about the King Who had No Butter for the Royal Marmalade, first published in When We Were Very Young, with wonderful decorations (above) by E. H. Shepard.
THE reasons ignorantly stated by this newspaper, like others, for Austria's having imprisoned me in 2005 vary -- and in all cases widely from the truth. It was not for "Holocaust denial," as the Telegraph journalist glibly parrots,
In fact: Austria sentenced me to three years jail for Wiederbetätigung, literally "reactivation" (of the Nazi Party!) under a Stalin-era law passed in 1945, on account of a lecture I had delivered sixteen years earlier, on November 6, 1989.
The law is also called the Verbotsgesetz, or Banning Law. Grotesquely, "democratic" and "Free Speech" Austria still has this law on its statute book and uses it to jail people of whose views it disapproves -- on this particular occasion it was at the written request (November 7, 1989) of a Jewish-Marxist body, the Dokumentationsarchiv des Widerstandes.
Are we powerful, or what! AWPOW!

[See the illustrated version of the poem]
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© Focal Point 2007 David Irving