Summer: The Real Jubilee

Thanks, Julie. I was thinking about how Cleopatra was described, by Enobarbus, in Shakespeares, "Anthony and Cleopatra" - "I will tell you. The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne, Burn’d on the water; the poop was beaten gold, Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that The winds were love-sick with them, the oars were silver, Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made The water which they beat to follow faster, As amorous of their strokes. For her own person, It beggar’d all description; she did lie In her pavilion,—cloth-of-gold of tissue,— O’er-picturing that Venus where we see The fancy outwork nature; on each side her Stood pretty-dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids, With divers-colour’d fans, whose wind did seem To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool, And what they undid did." She's a symbol of opulence, sensuality and eastern exoticism (aswell as female power) to the very conservative Romans and that reminded me of the opulence and sensuality of Summer. Not a fan of QEII though, I'm afraid or the Jubilee or Elizabeth Taylor anymore, not since the televised jewellery auction.