Episode 216: Are You Amused?
We'll get to Queen Victoria, but first an epitaph. Yesterday, the Countess and I lost the royal hound. Her name was Rinoa, a basset hound. She was there back in the days when Geoff and his brother would come over every Thursday night to read comics, drink Oranjeboom, and watch wrestling. She was there to be the first to welcome each of our two daughters back from the hospital. She had utterly no idea about how the game Fetch worked. She was in all ways a fine and beautiful animal, and she'll be greatly missed.
Now, Queen Victoria. She did have a mania for cataloguing every single item in the royal possession, complete with photographs and hand-written descriptions. The flip side of this was that she was actually one of the few monarchs who made the monarchy a profitable establishment. As opposed to the usual yearly desperate cry for more funding that had been the habit of the Georges, she managed to pile up a significant private sum and increase it through her long reign.
As to non-physical love, after the death of Albert, this was pretty much true. She had flatterers like Disraeli who called her "my fairy queen" and so forth, but she was in perpetual mourning after Albert's passing, and so anything more than words was strictly out of the question.
- Count Dolby von Luckner
I like Queen Victoria's fine selection of homey rugs.
I also like that, according to us, she was a hoarder of the finest caliber. Searching for "Queen Victoria" "hoarder" on the internet led me to this article about the Largest! Viking! Treasure! Hoard! Ever! Found!
In trying to learn what the second largest viking treasure hoard ever found was, I was stymied until I thought to check to see if Wikipedia had a category for viking treasure hoards.
--Geoff
