High Tea and Highgrove
Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

Highgrove reception

It wasn’t what I had expected.  A tour of the rather magnificent (and at times slightly eccentric) gardens at Highgrove House, followed by an evening reception with HRH. One hundred Friends of Mount Athos gathered to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the organisation. It seemed like light years away that I’d been on my hands and knees crawling through the snake and lizard strewn undergrowth of Mount Athos to try and undercover the path of the ancient Kaldarini (the cobbled footpaths between the monasteries) and here I was standing in a lounge suit next to Tyna meeting the patron of the organisation. He’d spent the entire day at Selly Oak meeting wounded soldiers from Afghanistan, flew back almost an hour late, walked straight into an evening gathering, spoke to every single person there and was genuinely interested in what everyone had to say. Call in what you like  - royal duty, service or a lifetime of training, it was a humbling experience.