While waiting...

...at the doctor's this morning, I read My Memories of Six Reigns by Princess Marie-Louise., which I recently borrowed from a friend. It's very poorly written ("There is one item of interest I should like to record with regard to a Scandinavian journey..." "There is so much more I could tell you of these dear musical friends..." etc etc) but it's deliciously scented with the whole sense and feel of some one born into British royalty in the 1870s, with memories of dear Grandmama at Windsor and Osborne, contrasting with the ghastly stuffiness of Prussian royal etiquette in Berlin...it took me miles and epochs away from an NHS waiting room in South London in the 21st century. Full of extraordinary bits of information, such as the Kaiser sending warm greetings to a Silver Wedding celebration of the author's parents at Windsor during World War I, while the slaughter was going on between the two nations...and of the author visiting General Jan Smuts in South Africa, bitter about the death of his child in British captivity in the Boer War, and having a deep conversation with him as she had lost a brother in that war...