“I’m not particularly bothered. I’m not out here raging, angry about it, protesting. But I’m not the biggest fan.”
– Nicholas Sowemimo, 36, who spent part of his Saturday afternoon at The Hawley Arms, a well-known pub in North London, but he did not watch the coronation (reported by Derrick Bryson Taylor in the NYT).
(1st on the stamp means First Class Mail. And why the ‘Royal Mail’? The postal service was created in 1516 when Henry VIII knighted the first Master of the Posts, Sir Brian Tuke.
At first, the postal system was exclusively for use by the king and the royal court. Ordinary people were only allowed to use it more than a century later).
LONDON — Britain’s Charles III was crowned king on Saturday, during an eighth-century ritual in a 21st-century metropolis with a handful of concessions to the modern age but the unabashed pageantry of a fairy tale, unseen since the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, his mother, in 1953.
“I come not to be served, but to serve,” Charles said in his first remarks of the ceremony, setting the theme for the intimate yet grand proceedings. The king, 74, was anointed with holy oil, symbolizing the sacred nature of his rule. He was vested with an imperial mantle, and the archbishop of Canterbury placed the ancient crown of St. Edward onto his head.
– As reported by Mark Landler in the New York Times