Buckingham Palace has confirmed that the British monarch, dubbed Her Royal Fireness by one British tabloid, grabbed a soda siphon recently after smoke billowed from a fireplace.
"The queen, with great presence of mind, put the fire out," said a spokesman of the incident at Windsor Castle, scene in November 1992 of a major blaze.
That prompted a confession from royal retainers: "Most of us used them for spraying the corgis. We used to get so fed up with them snapping around our heels," one told The Times newspaper. "She did occasionally seem curious about why the dogs were wet when it hadn't been raining."
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