January 30, 2013 at 5:54 p.m.
Christmas message

Year of celebration closes with serious challenges

Christmas message from Governor Sir Richard Gozney
Year of celebration closes with serious challenges
Year of celebration closes with serious challenges

By Governor Sir Richard Gozney- | Comments: 0 | Leave a comment

From Government House I wish you a very happy Christmas from Diana and myself as well as our sons, James and Alexander, who are out here for the holidays.

This 2009 has been a year of great celebration, commemoration of 400 years of the oldest of the English speaking settlements in the Americas.

A whole series of events immediately come to mind. It has been a celebration not just of that seminal event 400 years ago but, I think, of a Bermudian identity, a national identity, a Bermudian culture which has struck me as strong in the two years that I've been here and which has developed over those 400 years. So what have been some of those highlights?

I think the Bermuda Arts Festival was even bigger and better this year, culminating in a performance of 'The Tempest', Shakespeare's important play, which, for the first time, brought elements of Bermuda to the wider world because it relied in part on the first tales coming back from the island.

The Tall Ships, in the middle of the year, impressed everyone - competition for how many miles of bunting you could put up on all those masts along Front Street - a splendid sight which hadn't been seen in the islands here for nine years or so.

And then on the day itself, 28 July which was the 400th anniversary, we were off in boats from St. George's, out through the Town Cut off St Catherine's Point to cast flowers on the site of the wreck itself.

One of the Norwegian Line cruise ships came around the corner off St Catherine's Point and we all thought we were heading for a re-enactment of the wreck and not just a celebration of the 400 years. But all worked out well and the cruise liner joined in.

As we moved through the summer into autumn, we had a concert here in Government House grounds and more than 2,000 people brought their picnics along and enjoyed some music by local performers.

There was more music at the Tattoo when very good performances were put up, I thought, by the Bermuda Regiment Band as well as by the local pipe band here, side by side with the foreign bands that came along.

And perhaps the biggest highlight was when Her Majesty The Queen and His Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh came to Bermuda, for the first time in 15 years, to mark the celebration at the invitation of the Bermuda Government and of the people of Bermuda as a whole.

People were obviously praying hard the previous Sunday in their church services because the wind dropped, the sun shone and we were all able to go out onto the streets, had even more incentive to go out on the streets, to watch them as they toured the length of the island from one end to another. And that was a big highlight.

So it was a year of very serious and successful, I think, celebrations.

Now, I'm recording this message a week before Christmas but even only halfway through December, we've had some very serious developments. I'm referring, of course, to the gun crime, the shootings and three murders already this month. This casts a long shadow over the run up to Christmas. But I think about how Bermuda is coming together now, as I think it is.

We are seeing many strands of the community expressing their concern and a determination to do something, together, about it. I am reminded again of that Bermudian culture, Bermudian identity, Bermudian common purpose and overlap which I think will stand the island very well in overcoming this latest challenge.

So, let me repeat that I and my family wish everyone in Bermuda a very happy Christmas, a prosperous New Year and a rather safer 2010.[[In-content Ad]]

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