Why Chirac Won't be Facing His Waterloo

Why Chirac Won't be Facing His Waterloo
Sandi Toksvig
Wednesday November 17, 2004
The Guardian

Tomorrow, for one night only, the politically charged "Waterloo Chamber" at Windsor Castle becomes the breathtakingly innocuous "Music Room". Why? Because, keen to entertain the French president, Jacques Chirac, ERII, for reasons best known to herself, has decided to put on a private production of Les Miserables, that cheery musical referred to in showbiz circles as The Glums. Apparently the Waterloo Chamber is the only room big enough to fit all that flag-waving and wailing, and in the spirit of entente cordiale, no one wanted to upset Jacques, hence the change of name.

People in the production of Les Mis will not find this odd at all. It used to be common practice for artistes to alter their monikers. With some, the need to do so was clear. Betty Joan Perske clearly increased her sex appeal by becoming Lauren Bacall, while Truman Capote might have found his book In Cold Blood harder to take seriously when written under his real name of Truman Streckfus Persons. Other changes are less obvious. I can see why John Wayne didn't want to be Marion Morrison, but am less certain about Cilla Black's career having taken a different turn if she had stayed as Cilla White.

Of course, the complexity of selecting a suitable name is something with which the royal family themselves have some familiarity. It was during the first world war that King George V decided that the name Saxe-Coburg-Gotha wasn't terribly popular and named himself Windsor after the very castle of tomorrow's pageant. Renaming yourself after your house would seem a simple idea, but it has in itself caused problems. If Prince Andrew, say, decides to call himself Windsor, then, strictly speaking, he will be taking his mother's maiden name and thus making himself illegitimate, which would be bad. He can't, however, call himself Mountbatten like his dad because that was the maiden name of Prince Philip's mother, not his father, Prince Andrew of Greece, who did not have a surname. In fact, to find a legitimate surname for the poor Duke of York you have to go back to the paternal grandfather of Prince Andrew of Greece, who was King Christian IX of Denmark, of the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Beck-Glucksburg, which is a fine name, but hell to fit on a credit card.

Naming things matters. Part of the way in which the British expanded their empire was by hopping about giving out place names willy-nilly. Coincidentally, it was on this very day in 1855 that the Scottish explorer David Livingstone is said to have discovered Victoria Falls in Africa. The fact that he had "discovered" this vast drop of water (which, frankly, if you're in the area, is difficult to miss) must have surprised the locals, who presumably had known it was there for some time. Livingstone promptly named the place after Queen Victoria, despite the fact that it already had a much better indigenous title in Mosi-oa-Tunya - "The Smoke That Thunders". Livingstone had the power to name but that didn't make him a great family man. His wife became an alcoholic; he saw little of his children; and, ironically, his estranged oldest son changed his last name.

Changing names, however, doesn't change history. It only obscures matters in the mists of time. Richard Nixon's secretary of state, that legendary pacifist, Henry Kissinger, might have been able to change his first name from Heinz to Henry, but he never did get rid of that German accent. (Apparently, some 50 years after his family had left Germany, his brother Walter Kissinger was asked why he did not share Henry's heavy accent. "I," he replied, "am the Kissinger who listens.") I expect whatever they call the Waterloo Chamber it will still have the odd portrait or souvenir which can't be changed overnight.

There is, of course, another option. In an attempt to be a polite guest, Jacques Chirac could change his title for the night: as part of being president of France, you also get to be Co-Prince of Andorra. I can't think of any major conflagration between the Brits and the Andorran peoples.

If life's a game, it's too hard

I wasn't allowed to do science at school. At an early age and after becoming unwell over a dissected frog, I was "arts-streamed", which for all I know may be illegal now. Consequently, the world of science is a great black hole in my understanding and I have the highest regard for anyone who can pass a litmus test.

Professor Sir Martin Rees, Royal Society professor of astronomy at Cambridge University, is a man with so many titles that you just know he must be clever. He has decided - and do follow me while I put this in the simplest of terms - that it is possible we are all actually living in a giant computer game. He posits that as computers get better and better, eventually they might be able "to simulate worlds perhaps even as complicated as the one we live in". If that theoretical possibility exists, claims the prof, then so too does the notion that it has already happened. That we are all, if you like, merely software pawns in some vast Sim City.

This is a thought I can't cope with. I can't decide which is worse: the image that my 10-year-old son is in charge, or that I am in the middle of a game where some fundamentalist lunatic has managed to take control of millions of players and is busy shooting down opposition with a gun attachment on his PC.

I prefer to go back to Chuang Tzu, the Chinese philosopher who died in 295BC. Chuang wondered if the whole of his life wasn't actually a dream, and I like that. I have decided that I am dreaming and, if you don't mind, would no one wake me for the next four years unless absolutely necessary.