The Royal Baby Boy!

I wonder if the first night of Kate and William's newborn baby was as disturbed as ours. In our part of North London the heavens opened during Monday night. Violent storms with thunder and lighting raged until the early hours of Tuesday morning. As dawn broke, the weather was only a touch cooler, but as soon as the sun peeked out again, temperatures soared and we were in for another scorcher of a day in the city.

While I was trying to get my bleary-eyed self into gear and into the office in Camden yesterday morning, journalists and Royal followers were in a frenzy of reporting and expectations for that elusive glimpse of the new heir to the English throne. Outside the hospital, they waited and waited, while a steady queue of people ran past the scroll bearing the news of the birth at Buckingham Palace.

At around noon there was news of Kate's hairdresser being spotted entering the Lindo Wing of St Margaret's Hospital and that two gun salutes were also happening that afternoon in London; one in Green Park and another by the Tower Bridge. Since I was stuck in the office all day, I sent my very willing roving reporter @shmonn to capture some of the action, and here's what she came back with.

The King's Troop Royal Horse Artillery in full dress uniform... 

performing a 41 gun salute in Green Park, London.

Reporters were sited under cover outside Buckingham Palace

You can just see the scroll announcing the news of the birth of a baby boy .

And here's the first appearance of Prince George yesterday with his very proud-looking parents, Kate and William.

Photo: mirror.co.uk

The Royal Baby - Are You Interested?

Following on from my post about British Citizenship, which caused quite a flurry on two Facebook Groups, Finnish People Living in London and Britanniansuomalaiset (Finns in Britain), I thought I'd share my thoughts the Royals and the most exciting and talked about Royal event about to happen in the UK.

You may know that one of my guilty pleasures is to follow the lives of the Royals, both here in Britain and in Sweden. (We don't have a Royal family in Finland, thank goodness).

I don't go overboard with this nonsense (which it is, after all, nonsense), but I do like to see what the Royals are wearing, read what they are getting up to, and most of all, watch the weddings, which we've had quite a good crop of recently. The Swedish Crown Princess Victoria married in 2010, followed by Kate and William in 2011, and the second Swedish Princess Madeleine got wed to the British-born financier Chris O'Neil earlier this summer. To me this is just a bit of fun, or escapism. I don't wish to make a political statement with my guilty pleasure, nor do I wish to say (or for once, think) too much about the usefulness, or not, of the Royals. To me they're just like a real life soap opera. I know this is wrong on so many levels, but there we go, I told you it's my guilty pleasure.

Picture by www.hellomagazine.com

I also think that Britain really comes into its own with the various Royal events. The Queen's Diamond Jubilee celebrations last year, (together with the Olympics of course) were a highlight in the calendar and made the country generally feel great. There was a huge sense of community and positive feeling during whole of the summer.

As you can see I'm not dressed quite as patriotically as others were at Buckingham Palace last year.

The crowds outside Buckingham Palace during last summer's Diamond Jubilee

And now in 2013, to top it all, there's going to be a Royal baby. The due date was yesterday, so you can imagine that the press as well as Twitter and Facebook are all a flutter.

Photo by www.mirror.co.uk

What do you think about all this? Are you a Royal watcher like myself, slightly embarrassed about the fact that I enjoy the spectacle of weddings, births and funerals so much?

Or are you a confirmed Republican, who believes the Royals are just one of society's parasites?