ADDITIONAL Northern Lights could be visible this month due to gaps in Earth’s magnetic field.

That’s what scientists say, who claim that the sun is at its most active peak.

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We know that the sun follows an eleven-year solar cycle, which is controlled by its magnetic field.

It is powered by the poles on the sun changing places about every eleven years.

It is said that the sun has reached the stage in this cycle where increased solar activity can result in more sightings of the Northern Lights.

Eruptions and eruptions from the solar surface have been observed to become increasingly intense and extreme.

WHAT ARE THE NORTHERN LIGHTS?

The Northern Lights, also known as the Northern Lights, are created when Earth’s magnetosphere is bombarded by solar wind.

It is the solar wind that interacts with the Earth’s magnetic field, creating the beautiful green-blue appearance.

Charged particles from the sun hit atoms in the Earth’s atmosphere and give them a higher energy state.

When the atoms fall back to their lower energy state, light is released.

HOW TO BEST SEE THE NORTHERN LIGHTS

A NASA study 75 years of data show that March is often the best month to see the Northern Lights.

With the sun in its high solar activity phase, this month could be your best chance to see the best Northern Lights in the next decade.

To see the natural phenomenon at its best, a visit to a country in the Arctic Circle is ideal.

However, sometimes the lights are so strong that you can see them as far away as Florida.

It is best to check the space weather forecasts for your region.

You can take a look at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website.

When it is dark, go to an area where there is no light pollution and be patient as it may take some time for the Northern Lights to appear.

Please note that the Northern Lights may look dim with your eyes, but bright through a camera due to a higher aperture setting.

The tainted applesauce might have gone unnoticed for even longer had there not been a family in North Carolina.

Early last summer, Nicole Peterson and Thomas Duong were alerted to the lead levels in the blood of their young children during a routine examination. Within weeks the levels had doubled.

Mrs. Peterson said the couple worked with the local health department as they tried to determine what could be hurting their children. We “don’t sleep and we don’t eat – as if this is driving us crazy,” Ms. Peterson said. She and her husband filed a lawsuit against Dollar Tree, where they purchased the applesauce, and WanaBana, a U.S. distributor controlled by Austrofood officials.

A spokeswoman for Dollar Tree said the company is committed to the safety of the products it sells. Austrofood said it relied on its supplier’s certification and that none of its other products have been recalled.

Their three-year-old daughter, a fierce, smart girl who loves frilly dresses and nail polish, had a blood lead level of 24 micrograms per deciliter, nearly seven times the CDC’s level of concern. Her younger brother, an easy-going toddler who loves loud trucks and dance music, had reached level 21.

Public health investigators searched their home and daycare center but were unable to find the source. When the parents’ blood tests came back normal, they began to suspect one food only the children were eating: foil packets of cinnamon applesauce.

North Carolina health officials tested them and found extraordinarily high lead levels.

That prompted the FDA to take action.

In search of the Source

At the end of October, Austrofood recalled millions of applesauce bags. The FDA has said it believes this action has eliminated contaminated cinnamon from the U.S. food supply.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that more than 400 infants and toddlers have been poisoned. The average test result was six times the level found in the water crisis caused by lead pipes a decade ago in Flint, Michigan.

Flint exposure lasted longer and its long-term effects have proven difficult to quantify. But years later, the number of students in the city qualifying for special education doubled.

Earlier this month, the FDA said Ecuadorian researchers believe the cinnamon was likely contaminated by Carlos Aguilera, who ran a spice mill. Ecuador’s health agency filed an administrative complaint against Mr. Aguilera, saying he had operated without a license and used broken machines that increased the risk of impurities, records show. The complaint is being processed.

Ecuadorian officials seized packaged cinnamon from Mr. Aguilera’s customers who tested positive for lead, according to inspection reports and interviews.

But investigators found no contaminated cinnamon at Mr. Aguilera, the data shows. In an interview with reporters, he denied adding lead chromate.

Austrofood is not explicitly required to test its products for lead. Under FDA regulations, companies may only identify likely food safety hazards and develop plans to address them.

Austrofood had a plan, but according to FDA data, lead was not among the expected risks.

After the lead poisoning, the FDA cited Austrofood for failing to identify lead as a hazard, the agency’s records show.

Where was the FDA?

Tony Robinson’s beautiful machines

The dog house at Christmas

Forget JFK and Area 51, Covid vaccines and alien lizards in the royal family. The most entertaining conspiracy theories are generated at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

This particle accelerator, which analyzes the subatomic structure of the universe, caused such alarm among sci-fi neurotics when it was switched on in 2012 that some believed it would create a black hole and swallow the Earth.

Conspirators claim that this was only averted when a time traveler from the future jumped back here to make some crucial adjustments… which they say explains why the LHC is so often ‘closed for maintenance’.

But last year, when scientists at the Nuclear Research Institute started looking for evidence of so-called “dark matter,” the online forums really went crazy. Apparently a ‘wormhole’ has opened up in another ‘timeline’ and now we’re all stuck in the wrong universe.

It’s the kind of universe where anything that can go wrong will, which probably explains the sudden rise of horrors like the Big Brother revival and the final series of The Crown.

Although best known as Baldrick, here Tony Robinson gave us insight into how the particle accelerator works and why it has captured the internet’s overactive imagination, in the final volume of his Marvelous Machines (Yesterday).

With the help of four physicists enjoying a Monty Python moment, he demonstrated the Collider’s premise. Sir Tony was a subatomic particle, a proton, running in circles while the scientists pretended to be fickle electrons – first attracting him with a come-hither look, then repelling him with a grunt.

After a few circuits, Tone was approaching the speed of light, which must have been good for burning calories.

I always thought this massive underground facility looked like a Bond villain’s lair. In fact it looks more like a Victorian pumping station, with endless tunnels and massive metal pipes bolted together.

It could be a futuristic device envisioned by Jules Verne or HG Wells. No wonder science fiction fanatics find it ominous. One more big bang and we will find ourselves in a dimension where men wear handlebar mustaches and women wear whale bones.

Tony’s other views on the future were disappointing. The world’s first electric two-seat airplane was a can so light it seemed to have no doors.

Essentially it’s a Sinclair C5 with balsa wood wings and a 45 minute battery life. I don’t see EasyJet buying a fleet of these.

He also drove around the mountain roads of Wales in a 13bhp water-powered sports car. Very clever, but any sports car that can’t keep up with a Citroen 2CV will find a limited market.

Tony had so much fun though, and his enjoyment of these devices is so infectious, that I’m already looking forward to the next series.

If it doesn’t get recommissioned in this universe, I may have to apply to visit an alternate dimension.

Everyone can imagine a perfect parallel universe. For Lynne, an NHS nurse, this is the one in which her boyfriend is Hollywood actor Gerard Butler.

She visited Woodgreen Animal Shelter, at The Dog House At Christmas (Ch4), hoping to find the next best thing. “I’m sure we don’t have Gerard Butler in our system,” the cheerful receptionist warned her.

In the most touching story, a grieving man and his daughter adopted an adorable Patterdale cross called Crackers, which had been abandoned on the side of a busy road.

It is an eternal wonder that dogs can ever learn to trust people again after such an experience. But with a little love and a Christmas sweater, Crackers was wagging his tail again.

The last words Sara Platt’s doctor said to her before her life-changing procedure now haunt her. ‘He told me he would get his knife ready,’ she recalls. ‘His exact words were: “I’ll sharpen it tonight.” I’ll never forget it.’

For what happened in theatre was indeed life-changing, just not in the way Sara had hoped. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that she was butchered by him, if indeed he was a qualified surgeon.

The 33-year-old from South Wales had travelled to Turkey for a tummy tuck, breast augmentation and uplift after vast weight loss left her with loose skin. She had been lured by the prospect of a procedure at a third of the price it would cost in Britain — and the promise of recovering under the warm Turkish sun. Instead, she was left to rot in a dingy hotel room after an op that left her requiring nine corrective surgeries on the NHS. ‘My body is mutilated; I’ve got two holes in my stomach, I’ve got no boobs, I’ve got a hump on my back and I’m in constant pain,’ she says now. ‘What happened over there has ruined my life.’

Sara is far from alone. This month, it emerged that Turkey is set to overtake France as the second most popular European destination for Brits, largely due to a huge surge in what has been called ‘cosmetic tourism’, with travellers undergoing procedures ranging from boob jobs to Brazilian butt lifts.

The Government updated its travel advice this year to say they were aware of more than 25 British nationals who had died following medical visits to Turkey since January 2019. Others have been left with permanent medical complications ranging from wound-healing issues to life-threatening sepsis requiring intensive care treatment and emergency operations on the NHS.

According to the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS), those needing hospital treatment in the UK after cosmetic surgery abroad has shot up 94 per cent in three years — from 57 in 2020 to 111 in 2022, with 124 cases so far this year — with procedures carried out in Turkey accounting for more than three-quarters of those in the past six months alone.

The organisation started to ‘join the dots’, as BAAPS president Marc Pacifico puts it, two years ago, when colleagues shared stories of patients with complications arising from procedures abroad. ‘It became apparent that these stories weren’t one-offs,’ he recalls. He started an online database where those affected could share their experiences.

‘One of the fundamentals of plastic surgery best practice is whether you are doing the right operation on the right person at the right time,’ he says. ‘We were hearing things like tummy tucks on morbidly obese wheelchair-bound diabetics who should never be remotely considered for surgery. There were also many absolutely dreadful stories of aftercare — or lack of it.’

None of this, of course, is evident in the glossy marketing brochures or Instagram reels of influencers and reality TV stars offered money by Turkish clinics to promote their services and who, Marc believes, ‘normalise’ the concept of surgery.

‘The reason things are more expensive here is because of the regulatory framing and checks and balances we have. That costs money,’ he says. ‘There’s a rulebook in the UK that doesn’t exist elsewhere.’

Sara now knows that to her cost. After years of health complications, including an emergency hysterectomy, the mother of four’s weight had ballooned and she had been fitted with a gastric sleeve.

She lost 12st but was left with vast volumes of painful loose skin, which the NHS would not remove. ‘Surgery in the UK would be £33,000, which was beyond my means,’ she says.

‘I found a place where it would cost £15,000 in Turkey. It wasn’t the cheapest, but the clinic and the surgeon had plenty of five-star reviews although I have since found out they were almost certainly fake.’

In February she and her parents flew into Antalya. At first all seemed well. Sara’s hotel room was clean and spacious. But when she went for pre-op blood tests the next day, she noticed the hospital was advertised as a fertility and birth unit. ‘It seemed a bit odd,’ she recalls.

She then met her surgeon, who uttered those chilling words, and was told her procedure was booked for 8am the following day.

What followed was a nightmare. ‘The taxi they sent was late, so I arrived at 7.50 and they rushed me in,’ she recalls. ‘The paperwork was in Turkish and when I said I needed it in English they said there was no time or I would lose the slot. I was panicking. Dad was worried sick, but I felt I was too far in to pull out.’

Sara was put in a wheelchair and parked in front of an operating theatre, where she could see doctors performing a C-section.

‘Before I had time to ask what was going on, I was taken into theatre and a needle was put in my arm.’

She was in surgery for 13 hours and woke up in a compression suit, covered in drains and in horrific pain. ‘I couldn’t breathe; they had taken so much skin that I couldn’t expand my lungs,’ she says.

To her horror Sara discovered that not only had her surgeon operated on her stomach and breasts, but also removed skin from her arms and sides too — a procedure she had discussed undertaking at a later date.

When she plucked up courage to unzip her compression suit, she was horrified. ‘It looked like I had three boobs,’ she says. ‘The nurse said it was swelling, but it was fat they’d left. My body was green and black and the pain was unbelievable.

‘I called my husband and said I was going to die and begged him to look after our four children. The youngest is four and the oldest is only 13.’

She was discharged to her hotel room where, still in excruciating pain, she had to beg for fit-to-fly papers to go home. ‘It took weeks before they would discharge me even though they were giving me no care.’

Back in the UK, still in huge pain, her GP said her wounds were septic and she was rushed into emergency surgery for the first of nine procedures to try to address the damage inflicted by her Turkish surgeon.

‘I also discovered I had contracted MDRO [multidrug-resistant organisms] from the dirty implements used,’ she says.

Despite the best efforts of NHS doctors, she has been left with holes in her stomach and lumps under her skin where fatty tissue has died.

‘The trauma is so huge that I have endless nightmares and PTSD,’ she says. ‘I would do anything to turn back the clock.’

It’s a sentiment shared by Clair Shopland, a hairdresser and mother of two from Plymouth, who is still suffering from the botched breast augmentation and uplift she had in Turkey in January.

Clair, 37, says: ‘Everyone online seemed to be raving about Turkey. I found a deal for £4,500 which covered the surgery and four nights in a hotel. It wasn’t the cheapest, but it came highly recommended.’

The moment Clair arrived at her clinic, accompanied by a friend, she felt uneasy. ‘I asked to meet my surgeon and the co-ordinator said I’d meet him at the operation,’ she says. ‘It didn’t feel right and part of me was wondering if I should back out — but of course I’d spent the money and that makes it difficult as you’re invested.’

When Clair arrived at the hospital near Istanbul she was put in a wheelchair and given a tranquiliser that put her to sleep. ‘I never set eyes on the operating theatre,’ she says.

Like Sara, Clair woke up in another room in horrendous pain. ‘I’ve had surgeries over the years, from a C-section to my gall bladder removed, but this was by far the worst pain I’ve experienced,’ she says. ‘I was begging for relief.’

Nurses came to take her surgical drains out after just five hours and told her she was fit enough to return to her hotel room. ‘I was still in agony and had diarrhoea and sickness, but when I rang my rep, he told me to do some press-ups to get the blood flowing. I couldn’t believe it,’ she says.

After two days in agony, her surgeon finally appeared to remove her dressings. ‘One nipple looked okay, but the other was black,’ she says. ‘He said it was slow blood supply and no big deal. In fact, it meant the nipple was dying.’

Desperate to get home, Clair is thankful she pushed for official discharge letters, which have since helped her get compensation from the clinic.’Many people don’t get them, but my discharge letter showed there was in fact a problem with my nipple even though they had fobbed me off,’ she says.

Once home, Clair noticed a small opening under her breast weeping fluid. ‘My sister said I needed to go to A&E, where they told me I had surface necrosis, which meant the tissue there had died,’ she says. Doctors treated her with antibiotics, but after Clair was admitted to hospital twice again with septicaemia it was decided the implant should be removed.

‘I now effectively only have one breast and will need reconstructive surgery,’ she says.

Like Sara, Clair has been left with mental as well as physical scars, among them seizures which she believes are a consequence of what she suffered.

On Merseyside, Pinky Jolley has been left facing something even more horrific: a life being fed through a nasal stomach tube, the legacy of botched stomach-stapling surgery in Turkey.

Pinky, 46, who runs an animal rescue charity with husband Paul, decided to investigate weight-loss surgery after years of medical issues, among them pancreatitis and fibromyalgia, which had been complicated by her weight.

Told there was a huge NHS waiting list, she decided to look at private options. ‘A friend had it done in Latvia and it changed her life, but when I looked at where she had gone the package was £5,000 while the same procedure in Turkey was £2,100. It was just about affordable,’ she says.

Pinky found excellent reviews on Trustpilot and decided to book, flying into Istanbul with her husband in November last year. She had a chest X-ray and the following morning met her surgeon with an English-speaking representative. She was wheeled into theatre and awoke in ‘sheer agony’. ‘I knew something was wrong straightaway,’ she recalls.

‘All the nurses gave me was paracetamol, which didn’t touch the pain, and said I should get up and walk around.’ After five days in ‘total agony’ Pinky was discharged by the surgeon, who had not once bothered to come and see her beforehand. ‘When he did, he just took my blood pressure and temperature and signed me off as fit to fly,’ she says.

Convinced something was badly wrong, Pinky made a GP appointment the moment she got home — and was sent straight to hospital. A CT scan revealed sepsis and a leak from her stomach allowing fluids to enter her body cavities. Also, the surgeon had removed so much of her stomach there was barely any left. ‘He had cut so much stomach away they could barely get an endoscope into the cavity. They then had to fit a drain through my nose into the stomach to drain everything out.’

When she came round, Pinky was told she had been fitted with a feeding tube from her nose through her digestive system to her upper bowel. It is how she has been fed ever since, via a pump which provides a kind of ‘baby formula’. She is also on morphine for pain and there seems little option for further corrective surgery.

‘At the moment there is nothing more the hospital can do for me,’ she says. While she is hoping to sue the clinic, she knows this will be a lengthy and expensive process. ‘In the meantime I hope my story will act as a deterrent to others,’ she says.

Kevan Jones, Labour MP for North Durham, shares this hope and applauds those who speak out. He has campaigned for better protection for patients via tighter accreditation of practitioners.

‘I’ve asked the NHS to keep figures on the amount it spends on corrective procedures, but it won’t. But it is a huge burden on an already overstretched system and there is no doubt it is costing many millions,’ he says.

Kevan would like the Government to take a more aggressive stance against foreign advertising. ‘They are selling a lie that having these invasive procedures is as simple as having your make-up done and this should be outlawed.’

Until this happens, Kevan has one simple message: ‘Do not go abroad for these procedures and especially do not go to Turkey.’

BOWLING GREEN, Fla. – If golf has a superpower, it’s the ability to fill the cracks in your mind and soothe your fears. Jitters at the first tee. Contemplating a putt. New players are anxiously trying to figure out where to stand, where to go, what to do. Experienced players became irritated by every mistake and saw the score they hoped to score slip away. All the worrying about playing too slow or waiting too long.

Then there’s the scoring. A random number, determined by someone you’ve never met. You thought you played that hole well, but this card says you took a bogey. The word was born from a Scottish term for devil. So now your terrible game is an incarnation of a fallen angel, expelled from heaven, who abuses free will with his evil. Beelzebul continues playing.

But now imagine being given a scorecard with no criterion. Some tees at 50 and 56 yards. Others at 101 and 111. And 164. And 218. And even up to 293. One hole that can be played from 89 or 187. And on this card a glaring omission. No par. Just play. Play a match against a friend. Grab a few clubs, a few drinks and go. The winner of each hole decides where to tee off on the next hole. You can play a six-hole loop that goes around a beautiful oak forest. Or play a 13-hole loop. Or play all 19. Who cares?

“You know,” Ben Crenshaw, the legendary golfer turned course architect, said recently, “this game could be played differently.”

Why don’t we do that more often?

A new course opening in central Florida is once again making the question hard to ignore. The Chain, a “short course” created by Crenshaw and longtime design partner Bill Coore, opens this month at Streamsong Golf Resort. Guests can currently play a total of 13 holes as a taster. The hope is to open the full 19 of the track on December 1, as long as the country allows.

Streamsong is already known for its eclectic three traditional 18-hole courses, built by the current holy triumvirate of design firms: the Red (also a Coore/Crenshaw), the Blue (Tom Doak) and the Black (Gil Hanse/Jim Wagner). . The property, a converted phosphate mine, was considered high risk when construction of the first two courses began in 2012. Bowling Green, Florida, is located one hour southeast of Tampa and almost two hours southwest of Orlando. Even though that sounds far off, it’s still an undersell. In a state with more than 1,200 golf courses, who would go all the way here to play golf? The project progressed, however, because the goal was bigger than building a golf resort: it was the commercial development of reclaimed land that had little other use. It worked because Streamsong’s three courses are so good and so different that it carved out a place among the next generation of golf resorts like Bandon Dunes in Oregon, The Prairie Club in the Sand Hills of Nebraska and Cabot Links in Nova Scotia.

Like The Cradle at Pinehurst and others, each of these resorts features a funky short course. This also applies to Streamsong. This feature has become a prerequisite for resort life. For guests, playing (especially walking) 36 holes over several consecutive days is easier said than done. It’s much more fun to play 18 and then hit a loop on the short course. For the resorts, a short course is a draw, an additional amenity to the portfolio, taking up little land and, most importantly, encouraging extra nights of stay and play.

The Chain is a portrait of why this works. Guests at Streamsong walk from the hotel across a walkway, stop at a new 2-acre putting course (The Bucket), grab a tote bag to lug a few clubs and play a 3,000-yard course of holes available – here is key – good enough to match the quality of the property’s three core courses. Like any good short track, the character comes from the green complexes. Some wild and huge. Others are small-scale and delicate. There is a certain personality in greenery, born from architectural freedom.

“You can take more liberties, or risks, so to speak, by doing greens and surrounds that you might not be able to do on a regular course, where you’re trying to adapt to people of such different levels or strengths. as a skill. ” said Coore.

Highlights include a bunker in the middle of the 6th green, reminiscent of Riviera’s famous sixth, and the long 11th, a hole that can stretch almost 200 yards over a lake and opens into a giant punchbowl green .

But the real highlight is what The Chain, like so many of these quirky short courses, gives the players. It is different. In a sport so heavy on the individual pursuit, you and a few friends instead run together, talk together, drink together. In a sport so obsessed with numbers, there isn’t really any scoring. With a sport that is so time-consuming, you can be done within an hour. In a sport so dictated by strength and height, the skill gaps are closed.

In many ways it is a much more fun version of golf.

So why isn’t this version more widely available? Why aren’t publicly accessible copies of these courses appearing in metropolitan areas? Why can’t golf change?

There’s a chance we’ll get there.

“I think it’s only a matter of time now,” says Andy Johnson, golf architecture writer and founder of The Fried Egg. “Resorts are innovators in golf because they have the most incentive to create. Municipalities and public facilities have more restrictions and rules, which means there is less willingness to adapt. But we often see a lot of golf course trends that originate in the private space and the resort space ultimately translate into the public space. Public golf, and community golf in particular, is a very docile industry. So I think the short course boom will also come to public golf.”

Short courses make incredible sense in urban areas stuck with hyper-exclusive courses and limited public options. They just have to be built there. Chicago, Washington DC, Boston, Philadelphia: cities that require an hour’s drive to the track, a five-and-a-half hour lap on a busy track and an hour’s drive home. You can imagine that such players are thirsty for such an option. The most densely populated areas have the most potential golfers. There’s a reason why Callaway paid $2.66 billion for Top Golf in 2021: large numbers of people go because hitting golf balls is fun. However, anyone looking to make the transition from Driving Range-style Top Golf to learning the game on the course must tackle the thrill of playing with 14 clubs on a busy, intimidating 18-hole course, taking all the worries must be overcome. and shame at golf’s excessive rules and customs. Imagine if new players could instead relax and understand how golf courses can be experienced.

Based on Johnson’s explanation of the top-down composition of golf course architecture, perhaps we’ll see the success of courses like The Chain finally prompt local municipalities and private developers to renovate pre-existing, nondescript public courses into alternative short courses.

This in turn could create a whole new entry point into the game. Yes, par-3 courses already exist, but these short, resort-style courses designed by top architects are nothing like what the average novice has seen – short doesn’t have to mean easy. It’s a completely different experience. One that children and newcomers will probably want to visit much more often.

“You’re showing the most fun version of golf,” Johnson said. “Bold design features. Cool vegetables. People see the ball rolling and moving.”

This is not unbelievable. Short Resources for Designers require only small plots of real estate and can be built anywhere: flat land, rolling land, rougher land. All you need is a spot for a tee and a spot for a green.

Some early examples are worth keeping an eye on. The Loop at Chaska, just outside Minneapolis and designed by Artisan Golf Design’s lead architect Benjamin Warren, will open in 2024 as a 1,200-yard, nine-holer with eight par 3s, one par-4 and is the first in its kind of expressly configured for adaptive golfers. The Park in West Palm Beach, Florida is a Hanse/Wagner designed course that is a public-private partnership between the City of West Palm Beach and the West Palm Golf Park Trust, which has revived a closed municipal course. In addition to an 18-hole course, there is a nine-hole par-3, floodlit for evening play.

There are others.

There should be more.

But golf, as it often does, moves slowly. The best chance for change is for the math to eventually add up and create an inevitable shift. If renovating an entire public course can range from $5 to $15 million, renovating or building a high-quality par-3 course can likely be done for less than a few million dollars. What makes more sense for that community?

“It’s a more palatable expense for a parks department or a municipality, and they would be creating something that will bring in revenue,” Johnson said. “These things make a lot of sense. There just needs to be more momentum and more examples of it.”

Then perhaps we will see what so many are hoping for.

A different way of playing.

(Illustration: Sean Reilly / The Athletics; Photos: Courtesy of Streamsong Resort, Matt Hahn)

When a new play called Backstairs Billy premieres at the Duke of York’s Theater in the West End, we can expect a wry look at the relationship between the Queen Mother and her faithful Page of the Backstairs, William Tallon.

The comedy, starring Dame Penelope Wilton and Luke Evans, is set at one point in the tumultuous year of 1979: Britain is in political turmoil, raging across the country, but at Clarence House the champagne flows unabated .

However, the play also evokes memories of a completely different world – an Edwardian world now lost in the mists of time.

Although the Queen Mother died less than 25 years ago, the style in which she presided seems as distant as the Victorian era into which she was born in 1900.

These days, King Charles won’t grab a quick sandwich at his desk, if he eats at all, but the Queen Mother maintained, until almost the end, a way of life that had been the norm when Queen Victoria was still around. the throne.

Every day was punctuated by meals, and not just simple meals, but full-fledged affairs.

Drinks would be served before lunch and there would be at least three courses, with wines and coffee to follow.

Butlers circled the table and glasses were regularly charged. Billy Tallon was a magician with a drink and clearly seemed to hate an empty glass.

The Queen Mother joked about him: “There’s no point in putting your hand over the glass, he’ll pour it through the fingers.”

Tallon saw it as his role to keep her laughing. He also took it upon himself to be master of ceremonies.

He made sure the Queen Mother’s guests were relaxed and happy before she arrived in the drawing room. Once he had them arranged the way he wanted, he would go find her.

Her arrival would be announced by a pair of Corgis entering the salon. She would come in, and at that point he faded into the background and she took over.

The guests were often fascinating figures from art, music or museums – John Betjeman, Frederick Ashton, Roy Strong, Ted Hughes.

The Queen Mother found them, plucked them from their world and entertained them royally. Her philosophy was that if you came into contact with her, you should be sent away feeling happy.

In the afternoon a hearty tea was served. The household was given tea and scones, but the female clerks, for a reason of etiquette imposed by Tallon, were refused the scones.

The dinner was also a splendid affair, with the Queen Mother having changed into evening dress.

When she went out to eat, she wore a hat; when she went out to dinner, she wore diamonds or pearl necklaces and a host of other jewelry.

If it were a beautiful summer day at Clarence House, the Queen Mother would suggest that the dining table be brought out into the garden and set up as if it were indoors.

When she made her annual visit to Walmer Castle, where she was Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, the silver was brought from London and in later years the dining table too – for a formal lunch and dinner.

Clarence House was just one of her homes. When she moved to Royal Lodge, you could see a procession of cars heading towards the gates of Windsor Great Park. A similar form of entertainment took place here.

Croquet was played on the lawn, and sometimes there was evening entertainment, with Edward Fox performing, Noël Coward at the piano, or John Betjeman reading poetry. For Royal Ascot week, the Queen Mother moved to Windsor Castle. A surprised guest saw rows of outfits brought in, and plentiful hat boxes, as the Queen Mother hadn’t quite decided what she would actually wear.

And then there was Scotland – Birkhall, with its fishing on the Dee, and the Castle of Mey, in Thurso, saved by her in 1952, right on the northernmost coast of Scotland, Orkney in the distance across a wild sea .

She was truly the last of the great Edwardian ladies.

And yet the Queen Mother was not as extravagant as she is portrayed. Aware that people liked a bit of pomp and circumstance, she preferred to arrive in a large car and wear her best clothes.

Yet she did not replace worn carpets, and her decorator, Oliver Ford, once saw her twisting a finger in a hole in the fabric of her chair, but she refused to replace it. When she died, the wiring at Royal Lodge had to be completely overhauled. Her answer was often, “I won’t be here much longer,” and yet of course she was.

Anyone who goes to the play gets a glimpse of this rarefied life. It’s entirely possible that they consider Billy Tallon to be her boyfriend.

No, he had known her for half a century. He could enter her rooms unannounced, she trusted him. But he never sat down in her presence.

• Backstairs Billy starring Dame Penelope Wilton and Luke Evans opens at the Duke of York’s Theater on October 27. The exhibition runs until January 27, 2024.