I went to visit King Henry VIII’s palace on the weekend (Hampton Court Palace) with a college of mine from the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH). It was a lovely grand palace; big gardens, royal apartments, tutor architecture, and some excellent displays of the life of King Henry the VIII; his wives, his obese character and his dutiful servants.
Trouble is that the palace is still owned by the Royal Family. All of the Palace’s 1500 rooms, and all the objects within them, are the direct property of Queen Elizabeth II. This means that all the displays within the Palace; with their particular portrayal of royal history, must be condoned for the ‘appropriateness’ by representatives for the Royal Family. I find this strange; even draconian because this important history is manipulated by an undemocratic and unaccountable sector of British Society that still has and manages to cloak its immense wealth and power.
I asked some of my English colleges what they though of this. They said ‘what do you expect; they own it’.
A practical response! And I think I am onto something here. English ‘practicality’ hides some of the Nation’s deep seated ideological underpinnings. Uncritical ‘practicality’ masks the ‘normalised thinking’ of a deeply class-based society.
Lunarmedia Blogs » Breaded and Baked Chicken Drumsticks said,
June 4, 2009 @ 6:32 pm
[...] What’s there not to love about chicken drumsticks? They’re dark meat (more flavor), relatively inexpensive (certainly compared to boneless skinless breasts), they cook up quickly (half an hour in the oven), you can save the leftover bones for making stock, they’re kid-friendly (have you ever met a kid who didn’t like drumsticks?), and they even come with built-in nifty handles (so you can eat like King Henry VIII). [...]