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Home / Hawkes Bay Today

Roger Moroney: Another Queen's Birthday...and another

By Roger Moroney
Reporter·Hawkes Bay Today·
3 Jun, 2019 06:11 PM4 mins to read

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Roger Moroney is an award-winning journalist for Hawke's Bay Today and observer of the slightly off-centre.

Roger Moroney is an award-winning journalist for Hawke's Bay Today and observer of the slightly off-centre.

For the last 93 years the Queen has had a birthday.

In seven years, she will likely dash off a letter to herself congratulating herself on having reached 100 years.

Her longevity is echoing that of the Queen Mother who enjoyed a gin and a thrilling horse race through to the fine age of 101, and Queen Victoria also put in a good number of years — 81 of them.

Good genes I guess - and very good access to the best of dietary and medical requirements.

So then (I pose this question while murmuring a very poor imitation of Bradley Walsh) when is the Queen's birthday?

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If this was asked of any youngster who was treated to a three-day weekend because the school gates stayed closed they would reply "yesterday".

Yep, June 3 was the day we celebrated the birthday of Queen Elizabeth II.

It was also the day Queen Elizabeth did not. She and Prince Phillip raised a glass of sherry for her 93rd year on April 21.

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Mind you, any excuse to raise another glass of sherry "along with our lovely New Zealand ladies and chaps" can't be a bad thing.

I hope she's got a good supply because in Australia her birthday falls on the second Monday of June - a week after her birthday in these parts of course.

But not in Western Australia or Queensland.

The WA royal glass raisers celebrate her birthday in September, or it can be October - on a date that effectively changes each year.

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It's either the last Monday in September or the first Monday in October (go figure).
And in Queensland it is celebrated in October.

However, Queen's Birthday was overturned in Fiji a decade or so back. Political ructions intervened and the "empire" was not seen to be part of the political management's portfolio.

Or something like that.

She's a dear lady the Queen, for she has seen to it that her birthday is always commemorated on a Monday, which means a long weekend is in the offing.

She may have been a tad miffed in 2009, however, when someone came up with the idea that the Queen's Birthday Weekend should be renamed Hillary Weekend, after the great mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary.

For he conquered Mt Everest on May 29, just a few days before what is today Queen's Birthday.

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It started me thinking (something that is quite often perceived as a dangerous sign).

Apart from yesterday's public holiday, there's pretty well no long weekend on the calender until Labour Weekend in the spring of October, which makes for a slightly grim winter - and the dull and low sun days of the rest of June, July and August and half of September don't need any encouragement to be any grimmer.

What winter needs is a reason to make people happy.

And by all accounts a "holiday" weekend, which for many means a three-day break, will make people happy.

So how about we make the first Monday of June a part of the Sir Edmund Hillary Weekend and let's raise a sherry to Her Majesty on, say, the first Monday in July?

Then on the first Monday of August we can celebrate, say, Midyear Holiday Weekend.

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Then the first Monday of September can be the Welcome Spring Holiday Weekend and before you know it, it's October and we will be on the cusp of Labour Weekend.

The first Monday of November could, I guess, become Guy Fawke's Holiday Weekend - although with fireworks on the edge of extinction that might not be a goer.

Maybe just call it Sick Day Holiday Weekend.

And then Christmas arrives and then New Year and then she's all on again.

I feel for the Queen though.

With this remarkable array of birthdates through her years on the throne I've worked out that she must now be 392 years old.

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"Phillip old chap, order another pallet of sherry will you dear boy?"

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