Pete Gillions told me this delightful story about Dr Nott meeting the Queeen.
For more than two decades, Dr Nott – a consultant surgeon at three major hospitals in London and a Christian – has given up several months every year to volunteer to serve in war zones amid major humanitarian crises.
He recalled meeting the Queen at a private lunch at Buckingham Palace in October 2014 a few days after returning from Alleppo in Syria. He was sat next to the Queen and she asked him about his work there. And he was so affected by what he had seen that he could not speak. He said: “I had been coping in Syria with children that were really badly damaged and she must have detected something significant.
“I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to speak to her – I just couldn’t. I just could not say anything.
“She picked all this up and said, ‘Well, shall I help you?’ I thought, ‘How on earth can the Queen help me?’
“All of a sudden the courtiers brought the corgis and the corgis went underneath the table.”
Dr Nott said the Queen then opened a tin of biscuits and invited him to feed and stroke the dogs with her.
He added: “And so for 20 minutes during this lunch the Queen and I fed the dogs. She did it because she knew that I was so seriously traumatised. You know the humanity of what she was doing was unbelievable.” The Queen broke dog biscuits to share, and in doing so she shared a loving acceptance of his brokenness.
Mark is a lively storyteller and the author of four books, including The Spy, the Rat and the Bed of Nails: Creative Ways of Talking about Christian Faith. His work is focused on storytelling and how this can help us to communicate the Christian faith. He has written many articles for the Baptist Times, RE Today, Youthscape, Direction magazine and the Christian Teachers Journal.
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