“I’ve known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.” 

Margeurite Duras, The Lover.

I was reminded by Facebook memories recently of what had happened nine years ago on a trip to Sweden.

Yulia Anya Guthrie 3 July 2012 Stockholm, Sweden · 

From Facebook: Was at the palace for a ceremony, representing great gran, who can’t travel. We were all dressed up standing up for a ceremonial walk past, and everything was going so well until the band started to play Liberty Bell. I totally cracked up, also setting off Astrid, who is Swedish but was born in London and who was also thinking about silly walks, dead parrots, the Spanish Inquisition and A Man With Three Buttocks. I don’t think I will be asked to represent the family ever again. The funniest was later on when the two guards who had been assigned to us marched by to see us sitting in T-shirts, shorts and trainers, eating ice creams. The looks on their faces were incredible, but they were on duty so couldn’t say anything. To crown everything it has been a scorcher, and as I didn’t bring any sun block, I now look like a lobster!

Yulia Anya Guthrie 5 July 2012

We then travelled to our hotel, somewhere in the wilderness is a little settlement where, seemingly the American politician Al Gore came to stay. Tällberg is a small village located in Leksand Municipality, Dalarna County in Sweden. It is situated on the shore of Lake Siljan, in the northern part of Leksand. A special character of the village is that all houses and buildings are made of wood, such as timber or log. The village itself has about 200 permanent residents and a further 400 people have holiday cottages. There are eight hotels in the village and it has developed from a farmer’s village in the beginning of 1900 to one of the most known tourist and visitor resorts in Sweden.

I was delighted when I saw the wooden buildings and amazed when I saw my room as I had been allocated the Royal Suite!

Actually it turned out that the present King and Queen of Sweden had not resided in this particular room when they stayed at the hotel, but the previous King and Queen had. Gustaf VI Adolf (Oscar Fredrik Wilhelm Olaf Gustaf Adolf; 11 November 1882 – 15 September 1973) was King of Sweden from 29 October 1950 until his death. He married, as his second wife, Lady Louise Mountbatten, formerly Princess Louise of Battenberg, on 3 November 1923 at Saint James’s Palace. She was the sister of Earl Mountbatten of Burma and aunt of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. It was Lady Louise who became Queen of Sweden. Both Queen Louise and her stepchildren were great-grandchildren of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom.

This suite was certainly rather more spacious and rather more luxurious than my usual budget rooms in Paris!

Early night! 1.47 here and it has never really got dark. There’s a red glow on the horizon – I can see the sun out this window and the moon out the windows on the other side. There is also a large bird that keeps flying past this window. Have escorted our last guests to the house where Marlene Dietrich stayed for six months. I’m glad that there are so many highly respected people around who make me look dignified and stately by comparaison. Oh, and as predicted, the “****ie ****ie” song was mentioned several times and several requests made that we go back to see Ars Renata! I really should go to bed but I don’t feel at all tired.

Yulia Anya Guthrie 24 July 2012 Stockholm, Sweden

The penny drops! I’ve only just discovered that great-gran was invited to Sweden because she was a direct descendant of King Gustav IV Adolf of Sweden, who abdicated (or was deposed) in 1809 and retired to Switzerland (hence our Swiss connection) where he died in 1837. His uncle Charles XIII was elected King in his place.

However, Charles XIII was childless, so, in 1810 the Swedish parliament elected Prince Christian August of Augustenborg, from Denmark, as heir to the throne. But Prince Christian, now known as Charles August, Crown Prince of Sweden, died later that same year.

The Swedish Parliament then decided to choose a king of whom the Emperor of the French, Napoleon would approve and in 1810, they elected Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, a Marshal of France, as heir presumptive to the Swedish throne.

Bernadotte succeeded as King of Sweden and Norway in 1818 and the current King of Sweden – Norway became independent in 1905 – is his great (x4) grandson. So it was a case of the new line honouring the old.

I didn’t mention the incident involving Liberty Bell to great gran. I’m not quite sure she would have approved!

Yulia Anya Guthrie 14 June 2015

I wasn’t invited to the royal wedding in Sweden – unsurprisingly after Astrid af Wisborg and I sniggered very loudly when Liberty Bell (Monty Python theme) was played in Stockholm a couple of years back.

Perhaps it was just as well that we weren’t invited to Trooping the Colour either as, unbelievably, they played The Mayor of Bayswater’s Daughter just as the Queen appeared. That could have been a real disaster: “The Mayor of Bayswater has got a lovely daughter….” :-O

I thought perhaps there was a wink there to the Queen’s grandson-in-law, rugby player Michael Tindall?

Until my grandmother informed me that the original lyrics were:

“The ash grove how graceful, how plainly ’tis speaking The wind through it playing has language for me. Whenever the light through its branches is breaking, A host of kind faces is gazing at me. The friends from my childhood again are before me Each step brings a memory as freely I roam. With soft whispers laden the leaves rustle o’er me The ash grove, the ash grove alone is my home.”

And when I said I preferred our version she added: Ce n’est pas aux vieux singes qu’on apprend à faire des grimaces!

We would say: “You can’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs!“

That was me told! So, as Valéry René Marie Georges Giscard d’Estaing famously said in 1981: