Today is our Queen’s 70th birthday. The official celebration will be 30 April, the date of her mother’s birthday, so declared in deference to Juliana by Beatrix when she was crowned Queen of the Netherlands.
According to Elsevier the official photos for this milestone were commissioned to famous pop photographer Anton Corbijn who recently bought a property around the corner from where I live and now even goes so far as to call himself a citizen of The Hague (Hagenaar).
I watched a TV documentary yesterday and concur with its title: Spoken of by many, but unbespoken: She steered our little country through various difficult periods and situations. I admire her.
Funny though that in the sixteenth century (between 1581 and 1795) part of The Netherlands formed the Dutch Republic of the Seven United Provinces and was a Democratic Republic and now it is a Constitutional Monarchy (since 1830). Dutch like to do things the other way around.