 In this age of counterfeits, Duane Pearson is a genuine Renaissance man, accomplished academic and scholar, author of a half dozen acclaimed volumes of poetry, successful businessman, and now he has graced us with this lovely historical novel centering on perhaps the most momentous event in the storied past of our fair city. What impresses as one reads Annie and the Prince of Wales is first the uniquely engaging voice of the narrator, a mixture of playfulness, gravitas, and riveting storytelling. Second is a very clear amount of prodigious historical research that went into the crafting of this book. As we learn about Annie and her cohorts, we also learn details about Portland's past that were clearly only uncovered after hours spent sifting and winnowing through dusty tombs in the back halls and basements of libraries and historical research centers. So again, please join me in welcoming and congratulating Duane, and please help us with the Brown Bag series in local bookstores everywhere by taking home a signed copy of Annie and the Prince of Wales following today's reading. Thank you very much and enjoy. Thank you, Bill. I don't know how much that was true, but we'll take it. I really enjoy getting a chance to tell people about this book. I've done a lot of writing over the course of my life and so forth, but this one's very poignant, and it's kind of strange, because every once in a while I pick it up and start reading it again myself, which is very unusual. I've also had several people who have read it who said it's one book that they do reread. The idea for this generated for me when I was reading a book called Edward the Caressor is a biography of the Prince of Wales, Victoria's son, who became the Caressor because his mother never gave him any attention and gave him anything to do, so he spent a lot of his time chasing women around, I guess that's where the caressing came in. But anyway, the book started out with an 1860, his parents, his mother and Prince Albert were asked to come to North America, but they much preferred going to Germany. They were very much involved in Germany and they were all their lives. Prince Albert was from one of the Prussian states and so forth, so they sent over Bertie, their son, and he was an 18-year-old boy at the time and sort of a diminutive character, but they didn't have too much faith in his intellectual ability and so forth, but he came over and he did this tour and it was fascinating. They started up in Halifax in that area and then they went through North America for 90 days and they would hit these cities and they came to, they'd build these mammoths, dance halls, 5,000 people could come to these dances and so forth and of course everyone wanted their horse-faced daughters to dance with Prince Albert and so forth. I mean with that, with that Bertie and so, but it was one great story after another of that and all of a sudden, he's near in the end of his trip and he said, he's coming to Portland, Maine and where he's gonna, the British fleet will be waiting for him. I said, wow, this is good stuff, so I picked up on that and it's kind of, what is really amazing, it was in October of 1860 and that was the time of a confluence of so many events in American history that was taking place at that time. It was a little over two weeks before Lincoln's election and the city was just rife with debates and there was a lot of pro-slavery, a lot of anti-slavery debates up and down the street. There was a time of the great rebellion against alcohol, the passing of some of your familiar, Neil Dowd, the prohibition, things that came through and actually five years before this happened right outside here, Neil Dowd had gotten the prohibition legislation passed throughout the state so nobody could have anything to drink and I'll get back to that in a minute but he moved some beverages into the town hall which is where Monument Square is now and they were stored there and it was for medicinal purposes, he said, but everybody had their doubts about that. So a bunch of people came up to look at it, he called out the militian, I think three people died out there in a gunfight out Monument Square at that time. And so that was going on. There was also the time of the second great awakening, big religious revival, the second one in America's history where evangelicals all over the place, these big prayer meetings and everybody was being saved and so forth and so that was going on. So right in the midst of that, the Prince of Wales is showing up and he had really big events in Boston, Philadelphia, I mean I should say Philadelphia and New York and Boston and coming up here, they had hoped he'd be here for the big ball that they're having but no, he was coming up, going through Portland and getting right on the ships and leaving for England but the book, when he got here, the peninsula was just about ready to sink, it was overwhelmed with people. There were senators and college presidents just about everybody and it was also filled up with pickpockets, thieves and every other type of person you could think of was also here to greet him and watch this happen. Oh no, I think I'll just read you a few things here. It is a historical novel, history is as active as could be but that gets a little boring so I have gotten some characters in there too and a little romance, which we all like. Annie is a, there's two women in a figure very prominently but Annie's a young lady who lives out on the farm somewhere out near South Portland is in that area today but anyway, an opens with some say the nearest thing to heaven is waking up on an October morning along the coast of Maine. Anya, and that's her real name but they call her Annie, is doing just this, wrapped in the warm cocoon of the feather tick on her bed, she feels the cool crisp air through an open window, squints at the sun rising out of the east over the ocean and she hears the ever present melodic sound of the sea. As the one of any 17 year old Irish girl just for one moment she enjoys a flash of a romantic dream where in some day she shares the moment with a handsome young man at this time a fragment quite abstract. However, actuality hits her like a splash of cold ocean water. It's early morning on the farm and this means that chores must be done. Once again, reality trumps fantasy. The Ida greets her with, good morning, Princess Annie. We thought you were gonna sleep in this morning. The name Anya, old Irish in their vision has said to mean brilliance, wit, radiance and some wit and some will add beauty. Never has an appellation been more aptly bestowed. It is pronounced as Anya. Family and friends address her as Annie or sometimes Anya. Annie's smiling, grabs a biscuit fresh from the open ocean oven and responds, ah, absolute luxury. One day I dare say I will. Out with you now, your uncle should be about done with the animals. Go and gather me a few nice rape apples, if there are any. Make hasten when there might be an apple pie in your future. Leaving her aunt to finish preparing breakfast, she walks the path to a small orchard intending to gather groundfalls under the trees before they are feasted upon by various critters, domestic or feral, that inhabit the area. While we're getting to know how the ocean was so cold and lapping in the distance, you can see these great maps in the British Fleet, which is there in Portland Harbor waiting to pick up the prince who's doing two or three days. And wandering around, she sees something laying there ashore and she goes over and investigates it and happens to be a human. It's a body, still alive, a human part being. And she goes over and looks down and she sees it's a young man in a quite perplexed blest so she runs to get her uncle and can bring some over and he determines it's probably a sailor, it's escaped from one of the ships in the harbor. And he's quite handsome and handsome and so on and that appeals to her a bit. But anyway, they go through the process of rescuing this young man, getting into the house and they find out he's Irish. And of course, they're very Irish and everybody sort of likes this conjunction of sailor coming off of a ship as Irish and them together. And they integrate him into the household fearful for the Brits who may be searching for him and also what the neighbors are gonna think. But it all turns out quite well along those lines. And I go through, the story goes through the relationship there but we come up to some other people who interest here and one of the, oh, let me see here, where am I here? We couldn't get into the militias. There's a small, there's a unit of militias in Lewiston which we get involved in but at that time militias throughout Maine, they're militia companies and Portland had several of them and they had been around since the War of 1812 and they trained, marched around and did their things and a lot of people thought they're nothing but a big drinking club. But they didn't seem to have too much use. In fact, it was kind of thought they'd be done away with and this is 1860, who's gonna need any militia and so forth and what the thoughts were. So we meet a couple of them and they're getting ready small detachments and come down to Portland because the whole group is gonna come down by train from Portland, from Lewiston, from several communities up there and eventually they end up, I can never figure out the exact number but they escort the prints through Portland. There's at least a thousand militia and you can imagine them marching around up and down the streets of Portland. And I think that one thing that really sticks in your mind as you sit here today with this story, so many things in this story, right on this, the very area. You had the militia, I keep hitting that. The militia was going to march by. Upstairs, up above us right here, there was the new Portland Theater and there was a play put on for the office of the British fleet. The office was the only one that got a show that didn't there, let them list them in, come and show because they got a show in North America. We're pretty hard to get back on the ships. At this theater they put on a play for the office of the British fleet and four or five months later, John Wilkes Booth, who the assassin of Lincoln, started up there in Hamlet in the same theater. So no matter where you turn in the story, the troops marching down here, this and the things that go on Monument Square, the history is all here. I think about it every day when I walk the streets and so forth and one of the things that they had planned for the prince, which he wasn't gonna be here for, it was a great ball. And it was at the, where the current city hall is, but at the time they built this magnificent one and it was larger than the one presently because they had determined to get the legislature down here from Augusta. So it had a quarters for the assembly, quarters for the Senate and all that type of thing. It was a man of a thing. But this ball, straight out of Jane Austen, it was, I have the menus, the dinners they had. I mean, just a list after a list of things you wouldn't even believe they could prepare on those days. They had orchestras coming up from Boston and everything to play at it. And the tickets to the ball was, every male had to buy a ticket for himself and three females. The reason is they had these officers of British fleet and they wanted someone for them to dance with. So, and of course, my friend Annie, she gets invited by a neighbor who was very much taken with her, this farmer who thinks that she's, she would be a pretty good worker around the farm and could produce him some children and everything, just what he needed. And she was not at all, his name was Wilbur, she had to accept and so she went with him and his two, not too attractive daughters. And of course it gets into the Cinderella tale and they pull up out here, horses lined up the streets and a lot of them are parked up in the Monjoy area. I shouldn't be, they're tended up there. But they come up with this wagon which he made into a wagon here they call it. And they get off and everyone, who's that, who's that? Somebody says it's, the thing hasn't turned into a pumpkin yet. That's a Cinderella, sorry, everybody. But anyway, she comes in and at the dance, she just, all the local girls and everything, who was this and everything? And her mother had her aunt had made her clothing for her and so forth and she, it was all homemade and everything but it's quite well done. And she just metrics the whole audience, local boys who didn't dare to get too interested in her because they had the face tomorrow and the officers of the British fleet. And so the evening goes on and they have this great time and it has, dinner wasn't served until just about midnight and right after that they had dance cards and everything and her willward decided they had better leave after that and he's not had too happy anyway because though he is on the dance card all these young men around her all the time. So anyway, she takes off, they take off and leave but while she was there, one of the officers of the matter was, he was, and one of the large families of the biggest state in England and he was quite taken with her and we get into that a bit and the next day they're gonna be around for a day or so he goes out and visits her and family and brings her back and she and her parents, they actually visit the fleet and the visitation of the fleet is quite accurate. It's taken out of journals which I read here what it was like to go on these ships and the relics there from Lord Nelson's days and everything from the lanterns and so forth but anyway, we get there, the ball goes on, they have the several things for the British officers and then comes the day when the prince is approaching. He's on a train, you cannot believe it, he's gonna be on this train from Boston, a two hour trip and the money they put into making this elaborate, beautiful train for his two hour trip is mind boggling. It was absolutely magnificent and of course, all the way up, I suppose to stop at kind of Bunkport, all these places and it stops, he'll give a quick wave, these people all dressed up, they came from miles around to see the prince and a lot of them would like him to get a look at their daughters and so forth and they just gave away so a lot of them were highly peeved that he didn't spend more time but he was interested, he was anxious to get to Portland. The train comes across the Fort River out there and there was a 31 gun salute from up on the hill up on the west end up there and you can imagine 33 cannon going off, I mean that was a smoke going up in the air and so forth but the train comes, they unload, they put him in a couple of big carriages and so forth and they forgot most of the senators, college presidents and everything, they had nowhere to go so they run to the hotels, they get a couple of big wagons and stick them in, they're stacked in, they're like piles of logs and everything and they're going through, so they go up through Portland and a good picture, it's in the back, there's actually a few pictures in the back of the Prince of Wales, the picture's taken over and I believe Oak Street is somewhere over in that area and they marched down the Congress Street all the way up to the end near where Fort Allen is now and it's a magnificent site, they go by Longfellow's house and so forth, he was not, he didn't come up, he met the Prince down in Boston but his sister was living there at the time and they get up there, he's going to embark and the elaboration of it, they had a great arch up there they built, which there's a picture of it here and so forth, he goes down through that, the main couple of the Portland militia companies, of course they're flanking him, he goes down and so forth, he goes to get on the ships and the ships roll out there waiting and as they put him into the one that they're going to take him out there, one of the local women who had had a nice bouquet of fall flowers, she wanted to give him, has never been able to reach him so she throws it to him and hits him in the head, knocks his hat off into the water which floats away somewhere out there. But anyway, onto the ship they go and he gets on and something that you can't even imagine today but they were, they manned the yards, the sailors hundreds of them get up and they go up there rigging everything and they go up and they hand to hand, they stand in the yards up there which is quite a sign of dignity and appreciation for everything that's going on and there's gun solutes, bam, bam, bam and everything's shooting off and so forth and then they lower the mast on the ships, now here's the interesting thing, these great ships that bring the Navy and we always think about these men of war and everything which they were but most of them were being converted to steam so they had steam turbines on them so they could bring the mast down, the funnels go up for the smoke from the ships and everything and they go out of the ocean, out into the ocean. So it was a great day, there's probably never been a day like that in Portland or a time like that in Portland's history except in 1825 when the Lafayette attended here they had about much the same thing at the time and just everything about it is sort of transfixing and I hadn't even gotten into the religious stuff meeting they had down there of a man who was saving souls down there and the alcohol thing of course was major because at that time the alcohol consumption in America was about 24% a person higher than it is now these people did nothing but drink, they had nothing else to do, you know there's no TV, there's no book, most of them couldn't read so you had a very long winter up here so you imbibed and the taverns would even have buckets of rum there, you could just spoon it out in the buckets and so forth and people were drunk and then on the other hand they had the codeine and all sorts of elixirs, drinks so forth and you could go in any of what they call chemical sorts of time with pharmacists and so forth and buy a bottle of pretty strong stuff, lot of them you're familiar with from your childhood and so forth but housewives are sipping on that when they're sweeping the floor and everything and flying about a foot above the floor but it was a major problem of course which kneeled down as people were working on but at the same time you had a population here including the Irish who were very fond of their drinks and thought that that was the central part of life so for the ball and everything they lifted the ban for that and so forth so we get into all that stuff and by two romances we get into I think another thing that's a major of this that militias coming in on these trains unloading and they load them up and take them out and everybody just doesn't think in a few months they're aren't coming down again to get on the trains and they're going to war and the trains kept coming for the next five years in and out of Portland they bring in the fresh troops and they carry it the wounded would come back and if you had money and bomb and whoever was killed your body would come back and they'd come into Portland regularly and everybody would be down reading all the time reading the casualty lists and everything but that was the next step but at the time nobody could dream of that and I think there's several little things too which I won't get into but one really amazes me I came across a mention somewhere of the wide awakes and this was an organization that grew up they were so angry over Buchanan being selected as president by a bunch of them, nobody's in the 1856 that they got together and it was a Republican group and they said never again we're going to be wide awake so these guys marched around town and there were a large number in fact a hundred of them went down to New York to march and pray down there they wore these garments that were coated because they were carrying splanterns all the time so the stuff would drop down on them and they marched around these lanterns and screaming around a lot of wide awake and so forth but another thing on the corner somebody screamed out wide awake and somebody from across town would answer them and so forth I never encountered that, I mean that came across I just thought that was a little fascinating side part of the story but there's so much to it and the most of the people, a couple of people won the happy ending, so many of them didn't the prince himself, I think was the final thing I'll say on that is his birthday came when he's gone, when they're gone over they ran into such heavy storms that for a while they got blown backwards they ran out of fuel and they had to go some ships had to revert to sail he gets back to England and his parents are, oh he's back and they shoved him off to, they weren't even interested in what he'd done and actually his trip was quite spectacular and the aides and all these officials came with him so he did a fantastic job but his parents weren't too interested and then of course as you may be aware Prince Albert died a few months later and that devastated Victoria Victoria, he was German and a great German influence in the Brits at that time because of her but when he died she was just, she mourned for 40 years they sat at his clothes every day for him just like he was still alive so forth like he's gonna come back and Bertie was pretty much ignored and when she died and after a long reign in 1901 Bertie became Edward the seventh and he turned out to be a magnificent king some people think it's the best one ever the Edwardian age is looked upon he was one of the golden years in England's history and he died in 1910 now the problem was his son and all of Victoria's grandchildren married in Germany, Russia so forth one of her grandchildren was the Tsar of Russia another was the Kaiser of Germany another was the head of the Austro-Hungary Empire and they were full-viewers, very much taken in themselves and they brought us World War I and destroyed a whole generation of young men and there's some feeling that if Bertie had lived for a few more years he might have been able to hold some of that off and of course World War I leads into World War II in the present time but anyway, there's so much to hear about Saul in the book and I think you might enjoy it and I always like a question or two or three or four, yes? Probably should read the book but I'll ask you anyway, that scene from the 1960s seemed like the simplest explanation for that was that they had sort of an echo from the future. Yeah, they did, that's what's thinking that impressed me so many things are going on there you get into debates on the streets and you get into the people handing out tracks against drinking but the battle's over so there was a very strong group in Portland at the time that were still pro-slavery and one newspaper in town is always full of articles on how the slaves were really traded well in the South and so forth and we shouldn't be worrying about it and actually they tried to get the prince down there when he's making his tour but wisely they averted it going into the South to see how well the slaves were living but that was going on, so many things that were happening. So it was actually sort of bubbling up? Everything was bubbling up and I think it's an interesting thing too. It disappeared quickly because as soon as that week it was over with, Lincoln was elected, that was going on and right there from there they got into preparations for war and so forth so this event which probably would have been talked about and ruminated over for months just was shoved aside and of course the town hall burned in 1866 during the Great Fire, it burned, they rebuilt it and it's much where the present one is today and of course the one they built there that burned again in 1908 the one we have today was built but all this stuff coming true at the time it just sort of amazes me that how much focus there could be on that week that the people were coming even the Brits, they had a, they were casting an eye on this Portland in this entire area if they had gotten in, if they decided with the South during the Civil War their idea was of grabbing this area and all this for northern, attaching it to Canada they really wanted to expand across Maine and everything for the railroad and so forth they wanted to build oh yes, I'm sorry he was asking about this being the sort of confluence of everything that was happening in America at that time and it isn't that amazing, I think it is somebody told me that when 10% of the men of Maine died in the Civil War that Maine went into a depression you know a cyclical depression when it has never recovered I know that's true now but Maine had the highest percentage of casualties of any of any casualties? yes, casualties of any of the northern states that is a pretty small population an amazing amount of Maine so I got the numbers somewhere I'm going to the top of my head but the suffering was immense and then they went to the front oh yeah, they went to the front and they killed them and one of the characters in here of course is with Chamberlain at the little round top and you know we're all familiar with Joshua Chamberlain's story which is maybe so much exaggerated but that was, but I think there's 25 generals came out of Maine they weren't generals when the war started they became generals and of course Chamberlain stands above them all but my favorite thing with Chamberlain which most people don't realize is that he accepted the surrender of Lee's army, the Appomattox he had been wounded five times twice fatal when he lived through it all but he Grant selected him to accept the surrender from the Confederate army and at the time it was considered a magnanimous gesture as the rebels came and the rebel army came marching down dejected dragging their arms and everything he called the Union army said to present arms and clicked and all went up and General Hampton who was ahead of leading them down he reared his horse up in the air and called his men to present arms to march arms and they brought them in and they marched down in Grace and at the time people thought that was a phenomenal thing that had happened and in retrospect people weren't, we don't get in the romance that we did about the rebel army at one time but then well, can you speak more about the wide awake group? They are staunch Republicans and they wanted to make sure that the correct people including people who had an interest in what the government was gonna be in everything were in on the election of the president and the next candidate and so they really politic for whether they actually ended up with Hamlin and Lincoln, he was the pair and of course Hamlin being from Maine was the vice president but they marched all over big things, they selected I think 106 foot tall men from Maine that go down to lead the parade through New York City with this group and the idea was never again would they just let some Lumbachs be appointed president of the United States and they had quite an impact on who was selected that brought people's attention to it somewhat although sure everybody Yeah, I can't Yes, County But after reading it makes you want to go around I know it's a kind of restriction but it's just I don't know if you mentioned the big fire Right It shook out a lot Right I think that town hall, they have pictures of it back then I would think I would think Yeah, all the painting that the art they had in there was fantastic it's all in the book the things they had in there and so forth but she was asking actually if people should go around the day and be able to see the things from that time like at the town hall and so forth you read about it but you'd like to see them and I don't know why more attention has hasn't been paid to this I look at this and I say this is a phenomenal story everybody in Maine should know about it and shouldn't be aware of it including the flea I mean there's nothing like the British fleet being here they were here twice before but they blew the hell out of the place Yeah Oh yeah little things like well it's like nobody's heard about the horse revolt in 1825 when they burned down all the whorehouses in town Yeah and that happened throughout Massachusetts up to here but there oh there's so many things that just resonate with you and I know when I walk the streets I think about a lot of these things every day and you wish that more people were of course the church was still there some of the things are still here the mechanics hall where the British fleet was entertained there too with the great singer of the time and all these things but just nobody pays much attention I haven't seen and now there's very little they're very little and yes you back there Lincoln liked them a lot they were really very close friends but it was purely political they had to pick Johnson from because he's in Tennessee and which was a border state and he was an avid anti-slavery person so it was done for political reasons and Hamlin was pushed aside which is a shame because he was an outstanding man the I had one other thought there I was just going to give you on the oh I gotta tell you about Annie here some people wonder where she came from but I'm a real Jane you know Jane Austin things and everything there might be a little bit of her in there and a couple of friends I've known over the year but she's sort of I guess an idealized character but I like her a lot and the other woman in there is Addie who is very she's a Mary's one of the Lewis and met gentlemen in a hurry and she's not a standing person too but well I'll let you read on that yes Grand Trunk down there right down there's one building it's the only one building remains down there you've seen the building down there by the right the end of India Street and there was a great Grand Trunk that was the thing he terminally came into and trained what's that, bottom of India Street yeah well that's right and up the the dock where Victoria Wharf where Prince of Wales got on everything was a gigantic wharf up by Fort Allen Park it's no longer there they had a well where's Fort Allen, is that where the East end is called? yeah right up there it's still up there but there's a but they built this gigantic wharf there because they had this ship that was going to come it was called the Leviathan I think it was called the Great Eastern it was a gigantic ship which was going to come into Portland and the railway they were going to build across Maine with a pickup that would be just taking everything over through Canada and so forth and actually the city of Portland invested a hundred thousand dollars at the time which is several millions of dollars a day to build that wharf and to welcome this ship and the railroad which never happened they got screwed and yes when did the railroads come to Portland? they starting in the late 1840s but through the 1850s railways just really bloomed all through Boston all through Portland continuing up and a lot of people aren't aware of this right up to the 1950s in this in our century we had great rail systems all going all the way up to Eastport and I mean you could you could travel anywhere by rail in Maine at the time they're gone now it's a shame oh yeah summer people used to take them it's amazing but what was the reason behind that? well it was just to pick up the prince and they had a yeah no they had five ships of the line were there which is a lot some top adorables and everything and they were that's why it made such an impressive sight but we had a carrier here oh yeah we've had over the years they've had and the hood was here the ship that was sunk and the British ship that Irish was coming in but Irish immigration kept going Irish immigration kept going for the next 40-50 years in great numbers and this is a fact in here they mentioned the Italians will never come here because people were worried about them drinking too much but they couldn't stand the cold weather and so and uh... so immigration I also have a Shadrack Jones in here who was a slave who came up not through the underground railroad necessarily but he got up to Portland and I cover his history too from and he got a lot the British love these black escaped slaves in the ships are great workers and so forth so they welcomed them yes yes he came through here in 1825 Lafayette when he came in 1825 and it was a great celebration and I look sometimes in history books and they don't mention the Prince of Wales these two big events that happened back then sort of skip over historians sort of focus on what they like and are interested with that visit of Lafayette throughout North America he's just welcomed like you cannot believe there's a big deal I think it has up and down but Portland has sort of a fragmented history and people following it I don't know why and Portland hasn't grown very much population now is not a heck of a lot different it wasn't going so well I mean it's bigger but it was it's like a lot of cities boss in them I mean they've grown hundreds of times as high as they were but Portland's remained kind of static for somebody and uh... the history of it is kind of hard to track down a lot of these things and I knew I was looking forward I figured a lot of it would be in journals everybody back then kept journals so I go over to the historical society look at these journals you pick up the journal and the guy kept the journal for eight years uh... september seventeenth eighteen seventy one cloudy today looks like rain tomorrow there's weather that was the biggest thing everybody recorded the weather except there are a couple very good journals there which one of the guys covers his visitation to the uh... the british fleet went above the ships in there and they actually took people out there he was impressed with how shaggy the soldiers and the the sailors looked and everything you learn something from that you do yeah that's kind of it but we can't comprehend too what it was like to live in Maine during those days well you had really long winners and they say they're worse but they may have been they may not have been but there was nothing to do people uh... some people read but a lot of people didn't most people didn't and somebody came to give a speech I mean today we say oh I hope the guy didn't talk too long they're ticked off he didn't talk for two hours they love to hear people talk no matter what the hell they're saying and so they welcome them but uh... it was a different time but uh... that getting through a main winner and living here surviving everything was quite arduous and I think it's one of the things that's amazing here when you walk around the uh... when you walk around this town and the brick sidewalks and a lot of the streets somebody coming back from that time in 1860 was pretty much recognized the place they couldn't in New York City or something like that but they couldn't in Portland, Maine one more question yes they weren't now I cover that in here and he asked why I asked her friend here so many people are just staring at him and not cheering he says because they're Irish and then there's a lot of people a lot of militia in there and said we should be going down there to kick his royal ass out of here again like we did 80 years ago there was a lot of that sentiment but conversely people cannot figure out as we cannot today this sort of adoration of uh... monarchies and the kings and so forth a lot of people find the romance in that that we still do today is sometimes you wonder but that it's still there well I don't think we're allowed any more questions thank you very much