Thursday, April 28, 2011

New Zealand in Royal Wedding

(New Zealand Twitter)-European nobility gather in Westminster Abbey for Friday's royal wedding, one British lord is content to watch the nuptials on television in the small New Zealand farming town he calls home.

64th Lord of Little Neston, known as Kevin Couling to his friends, dearly wishes he could be in London to see Prince William and Kate Middleton tie the knot but says prior commitments prevented him making the trip.

Not that Couling expected to be rubbing shoulders with world leaders in the 10th Century Abbey -- his relatively low place on the aristocratic pecking order means he would have been angling for a vantage point with the hoi polloi.

I was invited to a party (for the wedding) on the Thames but just couldn't make it," he told AFP in his hometown of Shannon, a hamlet of about 1,500 nestled in the rural hinterland of New Zealand's North Island.
Couling said his title was a feudal lordship, one of many held by the Earl of Shrewsbury, and should not be confused with the far more senior parliamentary peerage, which confers a place in Britain's House of Lords.
Tomorrow wedding has created a "warm, fuzzy" feeling of goodwill toward the monarchy in New Zealand, Couling said, although he was unsure how long it would last.

He said becoming a republic did not seem an immediate priority for New Zealand but it was a prospect for which he was bracing himself.

"I do think in time it will happen, yes, and I'm pretty sure it will happen in my lifetime... although I do think it will be sad to see it happen.

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