The Lady Magazine

3 June 2016

Dear Readers, What is The Washer of the Sovereign’s Hands? It’s my guess that the vast majority of otherwise well-informed folk would be hard pushed to answer that question. Fortunately our cover star – history buff, monarchist and much-loved actress Penelope Keith – is an expert on this and other royal arcana, as revealed in this week’s interview. At 76, Dame Penelope is of an age to have witnessed the exponential growth of the ‘wedding industry’ over the last few decades. These days it is commonplace for the happy couple (or their beleaguered parents) to spend tens of thousands of pounds celebrating the exchange of vows – a state of affairs which clearly inflames Liz Hodgkinson, who proclaims modern excesses to be a nonsense. Now that the wedding season is upon us, this could be a particularly sensitive subject leading to a bulging postbag here at The Lady. We await your response with bated breath... Less controversial, surely, is Robin Page’s lament about the gradual disappearance of the cuckoo from his beloved East Anglian countryside. Who could fail to share his concern about this trend? But wait a moment – he also informs us that fellow Britons in the Scottish Highlands are driven to distraction by the cuckoo’s call. So perhaps, as the Roman playwright Terence pithily observed, ‘There are as many opinions as there are people: each has his own correct way.’ Until next week, best wishes, Sam Taylor