Even arriving an hour early all the best spots are already taken. It may take place every day, (every other day August to April) but it’s on everyone’s list, so they flock there well in advance to get prime viewing spots. Maybe it’s because it’s free or maybe because it’s one of those things to do when in London.
It is a pretty spiffy show, lot’s of shouting, stamping, striding and more stamping. All the while a shiny military brass band keeps everyone humming along. Then the horses arrive just to add a little more splendour and make sure anyone who wasn’t impressed before gets a wee shiver. 
The Life Guard are the rock stars of the show. Really. First of all, they’re the ones on horses. The guys in the big bearskin hats are impressive but a man in tight fitting pants, thigh high leather boots, holding a sword and astride a horse…Yes, it isn’t difficult to imagine any one of these lads causing a mighty swooning amongst the maidens just by riding over to say hello.
There isn’t much to do before the fuss and bother begins other than 
counting windows on the Mountbatten-Windsor family home. There’s a lot. They look fairly unremarkable, as far as windows go, until I see how small the guards on duty look as they stride across the front of the building. That’s when I realize the front door is a 7 iron shot from my side of the fence.
Behind me a group of Australians chat about a play they went to the night before. I join in, we’re all part of the same rabble, after all. I ask where in Oz they’re from and then they ask me where in Canada I’m from.
We chat about our travels and our lives out in the colonies. I look at the palace. And the enormous fence between the rabble and the royals. And all the gold that has been applied to parts of the fence to make the decorative bits really pop.
She follows my glance.
“We paid for this, you know.”
“Ah, so did we.” Perhaps I’d said something that implied we were here because of a lottery or game show?
“No, I mean all this”, her hands wave at the fence, the palace and the grounds.
I think about the bearskin hats and the World-Famous-in-Canada Queen’s favourite horse, Burmese: bits of Canada’s ongoing tribute payments to the great white mother.
We sent them gold, they sent us convicts. Canada got them too in the early years: Australia wasn’t the only off-site storage for the starving rural folk (aka ‘rabble’) displaced by the industrial revolution. We sent gold, wood, beef, beaver pelts, bear skins and more gold. Australia sent wool, mutton, yet more gold and a convenient place for the sun to rest but not set as it traversed the empire on the way to the biggest jewel in the crown, India.
We got a highly developed sense of responsibility, unrelenting politeness and just a touch of swagger. 
Aussies got drive, ambition and the charming ability to call a spade an expletive expletive anatomically impossible expletive shovel.
So, there we stood, birds home to roost but the gate’s closed and it’s only the hired help out in the yard. Not even a half hearted wave from the balcony by a semi-royal.
I guess we’re here, sweating in the sun, squished against the bars by the crowds because it’s one of the things to do when in London.
It isn’t really free, not in any sense of the word.
