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July 17, 2019 | News | No Comments
July 17, 2019 | News | No Comments
July 17, 2019 | News | No Comments
Among my fellow punctuation nerds, I have a reputation as someone who has no use for semicolons. I don’t hate semicolons; I hate writing about semicolons. Fortunately, now I don’t have to, because Cecelia Watson, a self-identified “punctuation theorist” who teaches at Bard College, has written a whole book about them: “Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark.”
At first, I thought Watson was doing with the semicolon what Simon Griffin did with the apostrophe in “Fucking Apostrophes” (2016). Both are slim volumes about an element of language that gives people endless grief. But whereas Griffin, an adman, provides straightforward rules, albeit with a bushel of exceptions (and a running joke: every use of the word “apostrophe” is preceded by a profanity), Watson, a historian and philosopher of science and a teacher of writing and the humanities—in other words, a Renaissance woman—gives us a deceptively playful-looking book that turns out to be a scholarly treatise on a sophisticated device that has contributed eloquence and mystery to Western civilization.
The semicolon itself was a Renaissance invention. It first appeared in 1494, in a book published in Venice by Aldus Manutius. “De Aetna,” Watson explains, was “an essay, written in dialogue form,” about climbing Mt. Etna. Its author, Pietro Bembo, is best known today not for his book but for the typeface, designed by Francesco Griffo, in which the first semicolon was displayed: Bembo. The mark was a hybrid between a comma and a colon, and its purpose was to prolong a pause or create a more distinct separation between parts of a sentence. In her delightful history, Watson brings the Bembo semicolon alive, describing “its comma-half tensely coiled, tail thorn-sharp beneath the perfect orb thrown high above it.” Designers, she explains, have since given the mark a “relaxed and fuzzy” look (Poliphilus), rendered it “aggressive” (Garamond), and otherwise adapted it for the modern age: “Palatino’s is a thin flapper in a big hat slouched against the wall at a party.”
The problem with the semicolon is not how it looks but what it does and how that has changed over time. In the old days, punctuation simply indicated a pause. Comma, colon: semicolon; period. Eventually, grammarians and copy editors came along and made themselves indispensable by punctuating (“pointing”) a writer’s prose “to delineate clauses properly, such that punctuation served syntax.” That is, commas, semicolons, and colons were plugged into a sentence in order to highlight, subordinate, or otherwise conduct its elements, connecting them syntactically. One of the rules is that, unless you are composing a list, a semicolon is supposed to be followed by a complete clause, capable of standing on its own. The semicolon can take the place of a conjunction, like “and” or “but,” but it should not be used in addition to it. This is what got circled in red in my attempts at scholarly criticism in graduate school. Sentence length has something to do with it—a long, complex sentence may benefit from a clarifying semicolon—but if a sentence scans without a semicolon it’s best to leave it alone.
Watson has been keeping an eye out for effective semicolons for years. She calculates that there are four-thousand-odd semicolons in “Moby-Dick,” or “one for every 52 words.” Clumsy as nineteenth-century punctuation may seem to a modern reader, Melville’s semicolons, she writes, act like “sturdy little nails,” holding his wide-ranging narrative together. She is delighted with the “springy little semicolons” of Irvine Welsh in “Trainspotting” (“The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling”) and she has a special fondness for the rare semicolon in Raymond Chandler, whose hardboiled private detective, Philip Marlowe, is not given to periodic sentences. In “The Big Sleep,” for instance, Marlowe describes his room: “In it was everything that was mine, that had any association for me, any past, anything that took the place of a family. Not much; a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that.” In Watson’s perception, that choice of a semicolon after “Not much” creates a reflective silence. “The semicolon reads as Marlowe having to stop to think.”
A sentence from Wittgenstein contains a “fantastically vague semicolon”: “Der Philosoph behandelt eine Frage; wie eine Krankheit.” (“The philosopher treats a question; like an illness.”) This has been translated by G. E. M. Anscombe thus: “The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.” But, in removing what Erich Heller, an expert in German philosophy, calls a “profound” semicolon, one that “marks a frontier between a thought and a triviality,” the translator has reduced a deep thought to a bland one. Watson writes, sounding like the “punctuation therapist” she sometimes plays, “Ambiguity can be useful and productive, and it can make some room for new ideas.”
Watson is especially thought-provoking on the topic of semicolons and the law, where ambiguity can lead to trouble. In Massachusetts, a semicolon that should have been a comma would have prevented hotels from selling liquor after 11 P.M.; it had the effect of making people buy a lot of drinks before last call. Worse, in a New Jersey murder trial in 1927, sloppy punctuation caused one of the defendants, Salvatore Rannelli, to be sentenced to life imprisonment while the other, Salvatore Merra, was sentenced to death—for the same crime. Legal cases are often built on precedent, and a judgment based on flawed punctuation sets a bad precedent, which can perpetuate injustice.
The semicolon’s two main detractors, the antiheroes of Watson’s book, are Donald Barthelme and Kurt Vonnegut, with Chandler complaining about a proofreader at The Atlantic (one Margaret Mutch) and Mark Twain weighing in on the ignorance of proofreaders in general. Barthelme found the semicolon “ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly.” Vonnegut wrote that semicolons are “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing,” a statement that makes me feel only more sympathy for the semicolon. What’s wrong with hermaphrodites?
Henry James, who would have been my choice for Master of the Semicolon, turns out to have been famous during his lifetime for his use of dashes. Watson writes that the dash “cutting a path” through any page of James is “an arm outstretched as a barrier to keep one thought from tumbling into the next.” She has unearthed an interview, from 1915, that James gave to a reporter for the Times, in which the Master (who did not do interviews, and on this occasion insisted that the reporter note “his punctuation as well as his words”) remarked that dashes “strike both the familiar and the empathic note . . . with a felicity beyond either the comma or the semicolon; although indeed a fine sense of the semicolon, like any sort of sense at all for the pluperfect tense and the subjunctive mood . . . seems anything but common.” Watson observes, “We live in the Era of the Dash”—which is probably just as well.
Both the dash and the semicolon are put to brilliant use in a page-and-a-half-long sentence from “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which Watson quotes in full. In it, Martin Luther King, Jr., details the miseries of a black man, a victim of injustice, who is asked to wait patiently for change. King piles up clause after clause, each describing a more harrowing, frustrating event than the last, and each lofted by the semicolon that concludes the one before: “when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading ‘white’ and ‘colored’; . . . when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness.’ ” The litany rises to a crescendo delivered with a dash: “—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.” Watson concludes that “this is mimesis at its finest”; the semicolons hold the prose “in suspension,” and the reader in suspense, waiting, along with King, for justice. Of course, King’s letter is about much more than punctuation, but here is an instance in which the semicolon did its small part for civil rights.
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July 17, 2019 | News | No Comments
On Sunday night I texted my twin brother, Chris, who lives in San Francisco, and asked him to excavate his memory about the bullying we’d experienced for being Asian while growing up. Our family moved around several times during our childhood: we spent elementary school in a Pittsburgh suburb; middle school was in upstate New York; high school was in Michigan. The schools we attended were almost exclusively white, and being Asian-American inevitably shaped our ability to navigate the social hierarchies that circumscribe the lives of all children. Some of the epithets we dredged up, in our texts: La Choy. Me Chinese, me play joke, me go pee-pee in your Coke. Ching chong. I remembered middle school as being the worst, but Chris thought that the teasing in elementary school was more pervasive. “We were more established in middle school,” he said. He pointed out that we’d managed to attach ourselves to a group of popular kids, and that had insulated us to some degree. But I still recalled ugly moments, including one when a friend—indisputably one of the cool kids—had to put a stop to the harassment. What Chris remembered—and it was what I remembered, as well—was the feeling of perennially being “on the outside looking in.” It’s a sense that persists for both of us today, at a constant low thrum.
On Sunday morning, President Trump suggested on Twitter that four congresswomen of color, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, should “go back” to the countries “from which they came.” The racist diatribe came in a string of tweets, separated by ellipses.
Many have already pointed out the fallacies in Trump’s tweets. Three of the women were born in this country; only Omar, who emigrated from Somalia, was not. Tlaib’s parents are Palestinian immigrants; Ocasio-Cortez’s parents are of Puerto-Rican descent. Pressley is black. They are all, of course, Americans. But it is worth pausing to recognize the racist shibboleths in Trump’s tweets, ones that have been used to justify other shameful moments in our history, from the Japanese internment, during the Second World War, to the Trump Administration’s Muslim ban.
As an editor, my normal instinct regarding Trump’s tweets has been not to engage, to avoid becoming an unwitting abettor of his attention economy. But Sunday’s tweets felt different to me. They were too dangerous to go unchallenged, the path from words to action too well trodden. There’s the assumed association with the countries of the congresswomen’s ancestry, a trope that has been used to question the loyalties of immigrants throughout American history. There’s the us-versus-them delineation in the language around “our government.” There’s the reproach to get out. On Sunday, I searched Nexis, a newspaper database, for variants of “go back to your country” and “murder” or “attack.” Some of what I found:
On February 22, 2017, Srinivas Kuchibhotla was having drinks after work with his best friend, Alok Madasani, at Austin Bar & Grill, in Olathe, Kansas. Kuchibhotla and Madasani both worked as engineers at Garmin, the G.P.S.-technology firm. Austin was a regular spot for them after work. A white man approached and demanded to know their immigration status. His name was Adam W. Purinton. He was fifty-one, a Navy veteran, and a regular at Austin. He continued to heckle the two friends and hurl ethnic slurs before other patrons intervened and escorted him from the premises. A short while later, he returned with a gun and opened fire, killing Kuchibhotla and wounding Madasani, as well as a bystander who chased after Purinton. Witnesses said that before Purinton started shooting, he yelled, at the men, “Get out of my country.”
In July, 2018, Rodolfo Rodriguez, a ninety-one-year-old resident of Willowbrook, a neighborhood south of downtown Los Angeles, was going for a walk when he passed a woman and a child on the sidewalk and suddenly found himself being beaten with a concrete brick. A witness said that she heard the woman, who was later identified as Laquisha Jones, shout, at Rodriguez, “Go back to your country. Go back to Mexico.”
In February, in Indianapolis, Mustafa Ayoubi, a thirty-three-year-old immigrant from Afghanistan, was shot to death by a man named Dustin Passarelli. Witnesses alleged that Passarelli yelled slurs about Islam and told Ayoubi, “Go back to your . . . country.” (Passarelli disputed the account.)
It was on the eve of Trump’s election, in October, 2016, when I experienced my own “go back to your country” moment. (I wrote about the incident in a column for the Times.) My family and I had just got out of church, and we were looking for a place to go for lunch. We were with some friends—all of us Asian-Americans—when a well-dressed white woman grew agitated at our group, because we were partially blocking the sidewalk. After she sidled past, she turned to yell at us, “Go back to China!” I was momentarily shocked, but then I abandoned my toddler in her stroller to confront the woman. As I was walking away, she screamed, “Go back to your fucking country.” To this day, I still think about what I hollered back: “I was born in this country!” As if that’s all I needed to prove.
The weariness that rose up inside me in the aftermath was, in large measure, for my two children. Even three generations removed from the immigrant experience, I wondered whether they’d ever feel a sense of belonging in this country. I happen to be currently reading Ocean Vuong’s extraordinary semi-autobiographical new novel, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.” The story of the book’s narrator, Little Dog, closely aligns with that of Vuong, who was born in Vietnam, came to this country as an adolescent, and couldn’t speak English when he started school in Hartford. In Vuong’s novel, Little Dog experiences a harrowing incident on the school bus, when he finds his face suddenly shoved against the window by a jowly boy, who admonishes him to “speak English.” Slaps from the boy and others rain down on him before they get distracted and lose interest. “He was only nine but had mastered the dialect of damaged American fathers,” Vuong writes, of the aggressor. As Trump stokes the racial fears of the millions of white Americans who are uneasy about the demographic changes unfolding in this country, it is that dialect he is championing. And it is the lot of so many immigrants, children of immigrants, and people of color in this country to wonder whether we can ever truly belong here, and who gets to decide.
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July 17, 2019 | News | No Comments
One striking aspect of the oral arguments, last week, in Texas v. United States, a case that threatens the Affordable Care Act, was the suggestion, from two of the three judges on a Fifth Circuit appeals panel, that what politicians say to or promise the public needn’t be taken seriously—indeed, that it hardly matters if they lie. The case, which I wrote about in this week’s magazine, was brought by states led by Republicans, and in effect argues that, when Congress passed President Trump’s 2017 tax bill, it was, unbeknownst to the public, actually invalidating the entire A.C.A. One roadblock to this argument is that this is not what Congress said it was doing. Instead, the law simply set the penalty for not securing health insurance—the “individual mandate”—to zero, and nothing more. But why should anyone believe them?
“How do we know that some members didn’t say, ‘Aha! This is the silver bullet that’s going to undo the A.C.A.’ or ‘Obamacare,’ if you prefer?” Judge Jennifer Elrod asked Samuel Siegel, an attorney defending the law on behalf of a group of twenty-one states, most of them blue. “ ‘So we’re going to vote for this just because we know it’s going to bring it to a halt, because we understand the tax issue’?” (The “tax issue” is the theory that, because Chief Justice John Roberts once argued that defining the financial penalty as a tax made that penalty constitutional, its absence was fatal to the whole law—an argument that lawyers might want to keep secret not out of tactical slyness but out of embarrassment, because it doesn’t make much sense.)
“That would be imputing to Congress the intent to create an unconstitutional law,” Siegel said, though it’s actually more convoluted than that. Indeed, the hypothesis is that members of Congress passed such a law just to be busted—to sabotage a law that they had failed to change legislatively. (At another point, Elrod asked whether Texas, one of the lead plaintiffs, might have been waiting to say, “ ‘Hah—caughtchya! You just did something unconstitutional!’ ”) When the penalty was repealed, Siegel noted, several legislators “specifically came forward and said, ‘We are not repealing the preëxisting conditions, we’re not repealing the subsidies’ ”—elements of the A.C.A. that are widely popular. If they did have a “silver bullet” plan, “that would mean they were misleading the American public and their constituents.” Senator Orrin Hatch, then the Republican chairman of the Finance Committee, was among those offering such reassurances in 2017.
“I’m not a fan of using quotes from elected officials, who say a lot of things for a lot of reasons,” Judge Kurt Engelhardt said. Engelhardt, whom Trump named to the court, came across as a silver-bullet kind of guy. An issue in the case is “severability”—how much of a large, multi-part law courts should invalidate if one element of it is found unconstitutional. The basic standard is that courts should be cautious and keep what they can. Engelhardt asked why it wouldn’t be easier to just throw out the whole thing and let Congress start over. “I mean, can’t they put together a sort of cafeteria-style package with all of these individual features that are so attractive . . . They could vote on this tomorrow!” he said to Douglas Letter, a lawyer for the House of Representatives, who was also defending the bill. “Couldn’t they put them together and vote on them like that?” Engelhardt asked, snapping his fingers.
“And obviously the President would sign that, right? No, obviously not,” Letter replied, provoking laughter.
In the health-care case, the public reassurances from legislators simply reinforce the most obvious reading of the law, namely that Congress had decided that the mandate could go and the rest of the law could, functionally, survive without it. But an interesting phenomenon, in the jurisprudence of the Trump years, involves attempts by the Administration’s lawyers to get the courts to ignore a disjunction between what the President says in public and the legal justifications that his Administration offers for his actions. In the litigation over the various iterations of Trump’s travel ban, for example, lawyers for the Administration argued that judges should ignore what Trump said on the campaign trail about instituting “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” as well as his tweets disparaging Muslims. Instead, the judges should believe the lawyers’ claims that the ban was not targeted at any religious group and was not at all discriminatory: the ban was just a reflection of concerns about national security. It took a few tries, major revisions, and the inclusion of North Korea on a short list of proscribed countries for the Administration to come up with a limited ban that the Supreme Court, by a 5–4 vote, would accept.
Similarly, the Administration, in its attempts to add a citizenship question to the census, first claimed that the aim was to protect the voting rights of minorities—a rationale laughably at odds with the President’s warnings of an immigrant invasion. The question of how courts should interpret the meaning of legislative and executive actions has always been complicated; Trump’s tendency both to dissemble and to incite, both to deny his motives and to bray about them, all at high volume, can make it trickier still. In the census case, though, the President lost: the Supreme Court found that his Administration had not offered a good-faith explanation for adding the question. The ruling meant, practically, that the question would be omitted; the task of having to justify its actions in an honest manner was apparently too daunting for the Administration to accomplish in the time left before the forms had to be printed. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, wrote (citing an earlier decision), “We are ‘not required to exhibit a naiveté from which ordinary citizens are free.’ ” The Court wanted the Trump Administration to tell the truth about what it was doing. Or, at least, the Court didn’t want the President to force it to pretend to believe his more obvious lies.
July 16, 2019 | News | No Comments
1. The revamped Hotel Excelsior in Dubrovnik, Croatia
Dubrovnik’s grand dame—the c. 1913 waterfront Hotel Excelsior—reopened in June 2017 following a seven-month renovation, in which interiors were modernised with reclaimed woods and understated earth-tone furnishings while the exterior was impeccably restored to its century old original form. (Over the years, the hotel has hosted the likes of Queen Elizabeth II, Elizabeth Taylor, and Princess Caroline of Monaco.) Don’t miss a daytime cocktail at Abakus Piano Bar and Terrace, which overlooks the Adriatic Sea and Dubrovnik’s majestic old city walls (easily recognisable from Game of Thrones).
2. Cruising the Lower Danube
The upper reaches of the Danube River, which begins in Germany and flows through 10 countries before ultimately spilling into the Black Sea, has long been one of the most popular river cruise routes in the world. Now, thanks to high demand from curious cruise-goers and ease in access to a host of Eastern European countries, the Lower Danube is opening up to tourism. To experience as much of the region as possible, consider a seven-day sailing on the Scenic Black Sea Explorer, which cruises between Bucharest, Romania, and Budapest, Hungary—stopping at off-the-beaten path port cities in Bulgaria, Serbia, and eastern Croatia along the way.
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3. The ice cream florets
Trending now in Budapest: flower art crafted from gelato that’s as tasty as it looks (and arguably the most photo-worthy ice cream you’ll see). At Gelarto Rosa, ice cream is scooped and sculpted into tiny rose petals, creating a single rose comprising up to three flavours of the house-made good stuff.
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4. The party scene in Belgrade, Serbia, one of Europe’s nightlife capitals
Belgrade’s Studio-54 moment is happening in real time, with a nightlife scene that easily rivals Berlin and Ibiza. Hit up some of the 200-plus floating barges known assplavovi (or splav, for short) anchored along the Danube and Sava rivers—the party rages all night long.
Image credit: Instagram.com/belgradespots
5. The markets of Skopje, Macedonia
For those who are more than familiar with the bazaars of Istanbul and Marrakech, head to the colourful markets and Old Bazaar of Skopje, which reflect the myriad of Christian and Muslim cultures that call this city home. You’ll find vast blocks of cheese selling for pennies, jars of ajvar (a savory red pepper and eggplant spread) lining shop walls, and old-fashioned barbershops giving $1 hot shaves. Food vendors here are more likely to give you a free sample than hassle you to make a buck, so get here before everyone else does.
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6. Sveti Stefan, Montenegro
A natural crossroads of mountain and sea, Montenegro’s seaboard combines medieval fortresses and Roman ruins with picturesque villages, pink-sand beaches, and sparkling blue water. Make a beeline for the most exquisite swathe of Montenegrin coastline, Sveti Stefan, and live like a modern-day royal at the former royal residence of Queen Marija Karadordevic, Villa Milocer at Aman Sveti Stefan resort. (Alternatively, head past the water’s edge and cross the bridge to stay on the resort’s namesake island, a stunning 50 rooms built in the existing houses of a 15th-century fishing village.) In either case, eat like a king or queen in the bona fide, lost-in-time fishing village, Pržno, due south of the greater Aman estate. Here, half-dozen waterfront restaurants serve daily catch for dinner—typically in the form of massive calamari rings, langoustines, mussels, and tuna. (You can even watch the fishing boats reeling in these fruits of the sea.) Book ahead at our favorite, no-frills seafood house, Restaurant Konoba Langust.
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7. Romania’s Corvin Castle
Transylvania gets its fair share of tourists in search of ‘Dracula’s Castle’, but the real gem of this region is lesser known—and infrequently visited—Castelul Corvinilor or Corvin Castle in Hunedoara. Foreboding and mystical, this c. 1446 Gothic fortress was built by regent-governor of the time John Hunyadi, and today stands at the surrealistic edge of fantasy and nightmare (feeding into all our medieval day dreams). Ogle at the exterior of double-thick impenetrable walls, a colossal drawbridge, and countless rectangular and circular towers used to keep watch and house prisoners. Inside, view the ceremonial marble-lined Diet Hall, a massive dungeon and torture chamber, and the remains of the ‘bear pit’, where human remains were fed to the castle’s resident bears.
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8. Waterfalls in Bosnia-Herzegovina
The waterfall-stacked Skradinski buk section of Croatia’s Krka National Park is so popular that the country is limiting how many people can visit. Thankfully, neighbouring Bosnia and Herzegovina has plenty of gorgeous waterfalls, too, and often you’ll have these magnificent waterworks all to yourself. Visit the wide expanse of falls and emerald pools of Kravica waterfalls in the south, or venture to Una National Park in the country’s northwest reaches to witness the power and beauty of the country’s largest waterfalls, Štrbački buk.
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9. The rakia revolution in Belgrade
Much like [the] craft beer and artisanal gin and rum movements in the US, fruit brandy is getting an upgrade throughout Serbia. Rakia, the country’s national drink (and known all across Eastern Europe under different guises), is served in its best and purest form—double distilled and aged in an oak cask—at Rakia Bar in central Belgrade.
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10. Edgy art in Shkodër, Albania
Admittedly, Albania has a tumultuous and violent past. But instead of ignoring this dark chapter in history, the country’s second-largest city has developed inspiring, larger-than-life art installations from the very war artillery that once ravaged the country. Namely, thousands upon thousands of bona fide bombshells form the foundation of eye-catching pavilions and artsy lamp posts throughout the city centre.
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This story was first published by CNTraveler.com
July 16, 2019 | News | No Comments
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15th Jul 2019
While the much-delayed 25th James Bond film, Bond 25, is only set to hit our screens in April 2020, it has now been reported that current Bond Daniel Craig will enjoy a retirement of sorts in the storyline.
While Craig is still playing the titular role of James Bond, a new, and some may say improved, character takes the front as agent 007–31-year-old actress Lashana Lynch. Previously seen in Captain Marvel, Lynch makes an astonishing entrance as viewers see the newest 007 as a modern day female. “There is a pivotal scene at the start of the film where M says, ‘Come in 007’, and in walks Lashana who is black, beautiful and a woman,” a movie insider reports to the Daily Mail. “Bond is still Bond but he’s been replaced as 007 by this stunning woman.”
As the upcoming film begins with Bond retiring in Jamaica, the agent number 007 becomes open for Lynch’s taking. Craig’s Bond still makes a comeback in the film when spymaster M, played by Ralph Fiennes, calls Bond back to take on a new global catastrophe.
Craig was originally cast as 007 agent Bond back in 2006. And while fans were shocked by the unlikely choice, Craig now ranks as one of the most loved Bond actors of all time, having played the character in the films Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall and Spectre. Bond 25 marks his fifth film in the decades-running franchise.
Bond 25 is currently filming in Italy and the UK, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Scott Z. Burns and Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
July 16, 2019 | News | No Comments
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For the hopeless romantics out there, royal weddings are magical occasions, filled with sweet, tender moments reaffirming that yes, love is real. It’s impossible not to sigh wistfully at the thought of princes and princesses exchanging heartfelt vows and promising to love one another for the rest of their natural lives.
Yes, there’s nothing more romantic than when a fairytale comes to life in the form of a royal wedding. Royal weddings, in all their pomp and ceremony, are the standard by which the romantic at heart set their dream nuptials.
For royals, nothing is off the wedding table, from custom wedding gowns to jewelled tiaras. Case in point: at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s 2018 wedding, the bride wore a custom Clare Waight Keller for Givenchy wedding gown, borrowed Queen Mary’s diamond bandeau tiara from The Queen, and had Grammy Award-winning singer, Elton John, perform at the reception. Talk about a fairytale wedding!
These kind of events don’t just happen overnight, though, months of planning go into royal weddings to make them into momentous history-making events. However, at the end of the day, royals and their wedding planners are only human, and despite the best-laid plans, things can and do go wrong, even to royals.
From a broken tiara to a bottle of perfume spilled all over the bride-to-be’s wedding gown, we chart the most memorable royal wedding day mishaps in history.
In 1947, the then Princess Elizabeth (see above) experienced a bridal nightmare when her diamond tiara snapped into two pieces as her hairdresser was securing it to her veil. The tiara, known as the Fringe Tiara, was loaned to Elizabeth by her mother, The Queen Mother, as her “something borrowed”. It had been commissioned in 1919, for Elizabeth’s grandmother, Queen Mary. The royals were prepared for something like this, though. A court jeweller was on standby and took the tiara via police escort to the royal jewellery house, Garrard to salvage the damage. The tiara was welded back together in time for the then Princess Elizabeth’s wedding. The only evidence of the mishap was the slight gap between the central diamond spike and the one on the right.
Lady Gabriella Windsor married financier Thomas Kingston in a gorgeous ceremony at St George’s Chapel in May of 2019. Her dress was designed by Italian fashion designer Luisa Beccaria, whom Gabriella is a huge fan of. According to , Gabriella broke tradition by working on the dress without her mother overseeing anything. Despite all her planning, there was a small hitch during her procession up the aisle. In her interview with , she recalled how her little bridesmaids kept wandering over her sheer tulle 20 foot veil, unaware it was actually causing her tiara to pull back. “I slowed down until they’d stepped off it, but then it happened again. Fortunately my hairdresser had pinned the tiara in place and it stood firm.”
On her wedding day, Princess Diana decided to wear her favourite scent down the aisle of St Paul’s Cathedral: Quelques Fleurs. Or rather, the perfume wore her. Barbara Daly, Diana’s wedding day make-up artist, revealed that the scent – which is the first ever true multi-floral blend, according to Houbigant Paris – spilled over the front of her gown as she was dabbing it on her wrists. According to , Daly advised Diana to hold her dress up as though she was avoiding to step on it to cover the stain. Luckily, her mishap was unnoticed by millions and to this day, only her stunning beauty is remembered.
There was a lot of secrecy surrounding Princess Diana’s wedding dress. Per , the now iconic wedding dress was actually kept in a safe overnight and was taken through a window on the morning of the wedding so the crowd gathered on the street wouldn’t catch a glimpse of it. However, despite all of this, onlookers gaped at the 25 foot train as much as the wrinkles on the gown as Diana stepped out of her carriage. reports that Elizabeth and David Emanuel, the designers of the gown, were “horrified” by the creasing on the dress. “We did know it would crease a bit but when I saw her arrive at St Paul’s and we saw the creasing I actually felt faint,” Elizabeth said.
Back in 2011, Kate Middleton’s wedding ring was a little too small. During the ceremony, as Prince William tried to slip the ring on his bride’s finger, it took some time as the ring was not moving past her knuckle. Kate had the wedding ring made a size smaller so the ring wouldn’t slip off as she had the same issue with the engagement ring.
Lady Charlotte Wellesley married Alejandro Santo Domingo in a ceremony in Spain in 2016, wearing a long-sleeve, off-the-shoulder ball gown designed by Emilia Wickstead. The cathedral veil she wore over her head, adorned in a Swiss dot pattern, flew up as the wind blew, but Charlotte just laughed it off. The wind, apparently, does not seem to care whether you’re a royal or not.
Princess Diana’s incredibly extravagant wedding dress almost didn’t fit in the glass carriage she had to travel in. The legend states her gown was so voluminous she only just fit inside the ceremonial coach, a necessity the designers had forgotten to account for.
Due to controversy surrounding Princess Beatrix marrying Claus von Amsberg back in 1966 (due to his German nationality), a large amount of protests took place nearby the ceremony. As the pair said their vows together in Amsterdam, security had to navigate smoke bombs outside.
During the four-hour wedding service of King Baudouin and Queen Fabiola which took place at the Royal Palace in Brussels in 1960, the bride was fasting for the Eucharist prior to the nuptial. This caused the bride to almost faint during the ceremony.
Guest stood in the sunshine in 1978, to wait for the beautiful bride Princess Caroline, the princess of Monaco, to arrive in the arm of father. Wearing a Marc Bohan for Christian Dior gown with a floral headpiece and veil, the bride looked the perfect picture of a relaxed royal bride. Unfortunately, prior to her wedding day, her dress design was leaked. The house of Dior couldn’t have the princess walk out in a gown that had already been seen, so days before the maison hastily made changes to the gown.
There was quite a commotion when the then Princess Elizabeth realised her pearls were not with her moments before the wedding, instead, they were around the corner at St James’s Palace. A courtier was displaced on foot to get them. As well, the bridal bouquet could not be located, eventually it was found in a cupboard!
The tiara Princess Diana wore on her head on her wedding day caused her some grief. The tiara, known as the Spencer tiara, was a Spencer family piece that was elaborately styled with flowers and diamonds in silver settings. Despite its beauty, Diana’s brother, Earl Charles Spencer, recalls the weight of the tiara gave Princess Diana a “cracking headache.”
The beautiful Queen of Spain, Sofía, accidentally tripped over on her wedding day in 1962. As the bride was so excited to tie the knot, she tripped over her Jean Desses gown. The gown, designed by the Parisian designer with silver and white lamé and covered in a tulle and antique lace, had a five-metre train, so there was no surprise that the bride took a small stumble.
All wedding days come with nerves, but for this royal bride, the nerves really got the best of her. During the civil ceremony which was held at the Empire Salon of the Palace in 1959, the bride burst into tears due to her heightened emotions. In the middle of the ceremony the groom’s grandmother, the Dowager Queen Elizabeth, had to step forward and comfort the bride to calm her down and make her feel at ease, right in the middle of the nuptials.
During the couple’s vows, Princess Diana said the wrong name! Instead of saying ‘Charles Philip’, she got the order wrong and instead said “Philip Charles.’
Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, (and not pictured above) experienced one of the most horrifying scenarios on the morning of her wedding. Her wedding dress was a magnificent white and silver dress with white diamonds. It also didn’t fit. Her dress was apparently made before her arrival in France and her dressmakers had to estimate her measurements. Legend has it that her bodice was too tight and could not be properly cinched. So, it was left open with a gap, revealing the lace she had on underneath.Click Here: watford fc shirt
July 16, 2019 | News | No Comments
Image credit: Jonathan Daniel Pryce
Given the main objective of a holiday is to relax, unwind, and press pause on the demands of everyday life, its little wonder that the worlds of escapism and skincare are intersecting. Nowadays, the new norm is to turn on the out-of-office and turn up to a far-flung wellness retreat to recharge the mental, spiritual and physical batteries. And that starts at the departure gate. Can you even recall a time before your cabin baggage was stocked full of sheet masks to ease the moisture-sapping effects of hours spent in the air? Here, our airside favourites.
Aman Desert Dew Face Mist, $84
Just as Aman properties reimagined the typical hotel experience with its unrivalled attention to detail and understated luxury, their skincare feels similarly focused. We love the Desert Dew Face Mist for its around-the-clock hydration.
Summer Fridays Jet Lag Mask, $73
It has a loyal following for good reason, this nourishing mask is loaded with vitamins and antioxidants to deliver a nice zing to lacklustre skin.
Chanel Les Eaux de Chanel Travel Set, $300
A liberal spritz of a pocket-sized Chanel scent is enough to perk up even the weariest traveller.
Lancome Renergie Multi-Lift Ultra Mask 5-Pack, $120
If you didn’t apply a sheet mask, did you even travel? This one comes loaded with gravity-defying firming ingredients which persist long after the 20-minute ritual.
Lano Face Base The Aussie Flyer Leave-On Recovery Mask, $26
For best results, apply this no-rinse mask to sleep-deprived skin just before touch down.
Dior Capture Youth Glow Booster Illuminating Serum, $162
Loaded with vitamin C for brightening, slather on this serum within minutes of landing for a complexion that defies jetlag.
Chanel La Crème Main hand cream, $87
Where to start? The ultra-hydrating formula means it’s an in-air essential, while the chic packaging means you’ll be looking for any excuse to whip it out of your carry-on.
Aesop Departure, $65
Ultra-chic packaging aside, these in-flight essentials are everything you need for a fresh-faced arrival.
The Travelista Jetset Antioxidant Boost, $82
With vitamin B3, C and hyaluronic acid, this lightweight formulation protects against environmental stressors like air-conditioning and UV rays.
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July 16, 2019 | News | No Comments
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16th Jul 2019
When Greta Thunberg began her school strike for the climate last August, the then 15-year-old could not have dreamed of the global impact she would have. The Swedish teenager has inspired 1.6 million young people in over 100 countries around the world to join in her demand for urgent action on the climate crisis. Thunberg and her peers have achieved what the adults before them could not: bringing the issue to the forefront of people’s minds.
But there is still a lot of work to be done, and it is young activists around the world who are continuing to lead the charge. In fact, Thunberg – whose speeches have been turned into a book, No One is Too Small to Make a Difference – is now planning to take a sabbatical year off school to concentrate on campaigning. “Once you fully understand the climate crisis, you can’t un-understand it; you have to do something,” she tells Vogue.
Spurred on by Thunberg, young campaigners are calling for adults to join in a mass global climate strike on 20 September, in a bid to force politicians and business leaders to act immediately. In the meantime, Fridays For Future strikes are continuing to take place every week and there’s a Youth Climate Action camp taking place in Germany in August – an indication of just how organised the youth movement is.
As well as taking part in coordinated action, a new generation has been inspired to look at specific issues relating to the climate crisis that are important to them. Here, Thunberg and seven other activists around the world, from Mexico to Uganda, share the reasons they are campaigning and the vital steps we can all take now to tackle the climate crisis.
Greta Thunberg on making your voice heard
Thunberg, 16, from Stockholm, Sweden, began the school strike for climate movement – known as Fridays For Future – in August 2018. She has met with politicians around the world, and spoke at the UN Climate Change Conference last December.
“Making your voice heard is what makes a difference; that is what’s going to save us. Yes, we need a system change, but we can’t have a system change without strong pressure from a large group of individuals. That is what needs to happen: an awakening among people.
“I’m trying to influence people so together we can put pressure on those in power. It is especially important for young people to make our voices heard. We can’t vote, [but] we can influence people who can. And that is what we’re trying to do, among other things.
“[The school strikes] has told me that when enough people – especially young people – organise themselves and get together, we are unstoppable. Many think it’s too late to get involved. But what they don’t realise [is] how few people are actually fighting for this. If you start now, then you are one of the pioneers. It is never too late.”
Isra Hirsi on ensuring the climate movement is inclusive
Hirsi, 16, from Minneapolis, US, co-founded the US Youth Climate Strike earlier this year, after initially getting involved in her school’s “green team”. She is particularly interested in climate justice, after seeing how global warming is affecting non-white communities around the world.
“People [are already] dying and suffering today because of the climate crisis, in countries like Bangladesh and Mozambique which are suffering from cyclones, hurricanes and drought. My parents are from Somalia, [which] in the past few years has suffered extreme droughts. When [those affected] are black and brown, people don’t really talk about [it].
“The people in these front-line communities know their communities and the solutions the most; allowing them to lead this movement is crucial. I feel it is important for me as a black woman to use the platform I have to talk about this. People of colour have voices and they deserve to be heard.”
Nakabuye Hilda Flavia on tackling plastic pollution
Flavia, 22, from Kampala, Uganda, is one of the leaders of Fridays for Future Uganda, which has been organising school strikes in the east African country since January. The student also carries out plastic clean-ups every week with other volunteers.
“Plastic pollution is one of the biggest challenges we face. It takes 400-plus years to decompose, [and] is a threat to lives both on land and in water. Africa has many freshwater lakes and if plastic goes into the lakes, it has a really big impact [contaminating the water supply]. During my clean-ups, I find dead fish suffocated by plastic.
“[Although] Uganda has declared a plastic ban, it has not implemented it; we still have plastic everywhere. I would like the government to implement it. Recycling doesn’t bring the issue to an end, [but] there should be globalised efforts to help countries that cannot recycle a lot of plastic by themselves. I also urge [people] to join plastic clean-ups and to reduce their [plastic] footprint. Take personal responsibility.”
Image credit: Getty Images
Asheer Kandhari on stopping deforestation
Kandhari, 15, from Delhi, India, is one of the coordinators of the school strikes in India, and also a member of #DelhiTreesSOS, a campaign group calling for the government to stop deforestation in the capital.
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“Last year, the pollution in Delhi was higher than it’s ever been. One of the main reasons was deforestation on a large scale. A year ago the government ordered the cutting of more than 16,000 trees [in south Delhi]. We climbed the trees and hugged them so the contractors could not cut them down. I think it was one of the most effective things we’ve done yet.
“Deforestation is one of the major factors affecting the climate crisis right now. [Trees are a] natural resource, they take in the carbon dioxide [being emitted]. Pollution is significantly increased; it’s already causing so much harm. It’s not only the humans [affected]; animals are losing their homes. We are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction caused by humans.”
Natalia Naranjo on moving to renewable energy
Naranjo, 19, from Mexico City, Mexico, is a member of environmental group Nosotros por la Selva, as well as setting up her own local action group which organises litter pick-ups. She is studying sustainable development engineering at university.
“President [López Obrador] in Mexico recently said he wanted another coal-powered plant for electricity. We don’t need that; you have to invest in sustainable energy. I would like the government, and corporations and big industries, to take action [on this].
“Coal is the most polluting way of creating energy. You can use nature instead – the sun, the wind, or water. We want every house to have solar panels, every hospital [to be powered by] wind energy. As part of my university course, we’re learning about new technologies. We have to create new solutions [to tackle the climate crisis].”
Anna Taylor on the importance of education
Taylor, 18, from London, UK, co-founded the UK Student Climate Network, after being inspired by the school strikes taking place in other countries. The group is demanding for education reform, along with a green new deal for Britain.
“Education is extremely important, because [that’s] what allows people to see the real need for action. [One of our] demands is [for the government] to reform the national curriculum, so it addresses the ecological crisis as an educational priority. It should be something that’s taught in every subject; it is the greatest threat facing our future.
“What the climate strikes are doing is actually educating kids. Other children are seeing their friends going and they’re starting to read about climate change. The [wider] public are also being educated because of the strikes.”
India Logan-Riley on protecting indigenous communities
Logan-Riley, 25, from Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand, is part of Te Ara Whatu, an indigenous youth climate group. She was part of the first indigenous youth delegation to attend the 2017 UN climate change conference.
“For me, climate change is an outcome of colonisation, which has removed indigenous communities’ ability to defend the land and the water. We know that within my lifetime, we will be forced to move inland because our land will be eroded by the sea. We have also seen seasonal droughts, which have become much more severe. We’re starting to see wildfires, too. There’s a very real threat of losing our land, our home.
“It’s really important that the wider climate movement aligns itself with the aspirations of indigenous communities [and] amplifies the solutions that we advocate for. [We have to] address climate change in a way that leaves no one behind.”
Marinel Ubaldo on lobbying governments
Ubaldo, 22, from Tacloban City, Philippines, is Plan International’s youth ambassador for climate change. She was among those who submitted a petition to the Human Rights Commission in the Philippines, demanding for an investigation into the actions of fossil fuel companies.
“It’s important to lobby governments; they need to act now – it’s an emergency. I want them to make laws [to tackle climate change] and own the problem. Governments can get big businesses to follow environmental guidelines, they can implement laws to stop rubbish being burned. They have the resources to [create a] big impact.
“It’s important to get the involvement of local governments, too. The Tacloban City council submitted a letter to the [Philippines’] Human Rights Commission in May in support of the petition we filed [to investigate whether 47 fossil fuel companies have violated human rights due to their role in climate change].
“Protesting is one way of getting attention from the politicians. Writing letters is another way. Invite them to your events to make them realise [the work] you’re doing.”