Dr dear Dr: What for goodness sake is the state of play vis-a-vis the Queen of England’s health, and was this the real reason for her no-showing at the Ulster Centenary in 2021?

Funnily enough, a foreign theologian who ran some Theology Department in Europa Vetus, once came on a visit to the GB mainland, and when asked various questions about South America, the Red Indians of the Guarano tribe and so on, responded that among all the several GB students he received in his Faculty in Switzerland, very few of the students from these islands ever like ever produced an interesting essay on the civil war then raging in a part of the UK, and that was the Ulster problem, which fact he found really odd, quite strange in fact, given the selfsame students’s passion for the liberation theologians of the Brazilian rain forest regions. Quite odd really given that theology is supposed to reflect on one’s own lived experience in a contextualised format for such liberation theologies. And he was perturbed. Quite. Anyway, it is not surprising though that if the Queen suffers from any and even the mildest of debilitating conditions like ME or whichever, that she should be advised by her concerned doctors to avoid a civil war zone even though now in the ex department since she is a fragile flower, the most delicate and refined flower of her generation of the 1950s, for whom some of the rough and tumble and directness of speech and generic unpleasantness of Ulster politics today is excruciatingly difficult for one so refined honestly to bear. We must be patient and forbearing when discussing and inviting such kindly souls to visit us, especially right into the heart of an old civil war zone - it stands to reason. Speaking of philosophy, and reaching for a handbook of a blog called Reason Unaided, a Chinese philosopher, not Confucius, once said that a long war benefits no-one, and this is possibly the kind of philosophy that inspires that delicate flower. So tough frontiers. Fragile queen. Poor delicate soul. Understanding is the generic recipe for such occasions - I Cor 13, love is patient, love is kind.