When I was younger, maybe ten or something, my dad was awarded a queen’s gallantry medal for helping to rescue a little boy out who had fallen into a hole on the local woodland. It was no ordinary hole; the boy had fallen down quite a distance and was held in place by his ears, with a further drop below him. My dad was one of the men who crawled down a makeshift shaft dug to try and reach the boy. In the end they rescued the boy using ropes and hoists and topside equipment to drag him back out, hopefully not with attachments looped around his ears, but the bravery of the three men who navigated the rough tunnel was still recognised by the aforementioned award. So, back before it was a tourist attraction, I got to go to the palace. Funnily, my main memories are about the size of the paintings, the fact that the toilets didn’t have doors, but rather the doors were disguised as the ~walls~, and extreme boredom from having to sit through a ceremony that lasted for what felt like a lifetime before my dad came out; he was pretty much at the end of the procession of medal receivers. Oh, yeah, and the beefeaters….. they were all about eighty, and looked like they could barely stand up – they swayed.