281: In which I temporarily become a Royalist

“Checkmate Kate, you’ve taken the king” - banner being waved in the crowd

Pundits talked worriedly about our cynical age, or lack of deference and respect for tradition, and regular readers of this blog may consider me a cynic.  I consider myself to be a sceptical optimist, but that’s another matter entirely.  The point I’m working towards, is that I have thoroughly enjoyed this whole Royal wedding from start to finish.  As I write now we are waiting for the couple to make their balcony appearance.  I suspect that had I followed any of the media hype leading up to today, I would have been bored shitless of the whole thing weeks ago.  Fortunately it all passed me by and today has been the first point in which I have paid it any attention.

Charles and Diana were married the same year as my parents; William was born just a few months after me; and now William marries the love he met at university as I make preparations to marry my university love.  We are like proper bros (as in “...before hoes”, not the highly respected groundbreaking pop band).

Now as I continue this post, a day has passed and I can look back on the events of yesterday separated from the emotional involvement.  The scale of the whole wasteful, mass-fawning swept me up with the excitement and the emotion.  The Royal family became human; not untouchable deities, or posh unwanted arseholes.  Charles was the proud dad and the Queen was everyone’s grandmother.  Everyone was wearing bizarre multicoloured and oddly accessorised clothing.  A Lancaster bomber flies overhead flanked by a Spitfire and a Hurricane Hawk.  Pundits tediously wibbled on and on about peoples clothes, instead of telling us who the guests were and why they were there.  The Beckhams...wtf?  The maid of honour was distracting in a low cut dress.  The bride and groom looked nervous and happy; you know, like actual human people... amazing.

I’m endlessly fascinated by the Royal habit of not having surnames like us commoners.  Windsor is not the family's surname; it is the House name, and has been since 1917 when George V changed it from the too German Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.   We learned that William’s full name is William Arthur Phillip Louis, and his wedding present from his little ol’ granny was the titles Duke of Cambridge, Earl of Strathearn, and Barron Carrickfergus.  Kate is no longer a Middleton; her full name is now simply Katherine Elizabeth, Duchess of Cambridge.  She joins the House of Windsor, but due to not being a blood relative of Prince Phillip, she is not a member of the much more excitingly named House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg.

I can now look back on yesterday, slightly confused as to how excited I was by it all.  I felt strange new feelings of national pride, jingoism, flag-waving, communal mania... now there is an almost unpleasant hangover lull.  It was the wedding of people I don’t know, suspect I wouldn’t have anything in common with; people who probably wouldn’t cross a courtyard to pour champagne on me.  It was fun while it lasted, just stay away from The Mail.  Not because it will be full of the wedding for the next million years, just as a general rule of thumb; stay away from The Mail.

By the way, the couple looked very happy; best of luck to them.

275: bank holiday stress; need a few days at work for a rest

These long bank holiday weekends are tiring things.  Four days of socialising, drinking effectively non-stop, eating nothing except spiced meat, potatoes and gravy, burning in the sun; and all that after two days of exhibition openings, burning in the sun; and all that after two days of exhibition openings.  I’ve just slept through Singing in the Rain, for about the twentieth time.  I see the start, I see the end, but all the stuff in the middle is a mystery, like what they put in hotdogs.  I must warn you now that I am extremely sleepy and have prepared no theme for today.  So no interesting article, no amusing rant, no... None of the rest of it.  So if you want to bail out now, don’t be embarrassed; I won’t be annoyed.  There are other things for you to read.

David Icke's totally plausible theory 

Three days back at work, for a nice rest, followed by another exhausting bank holiday.  There’s the bloody royal wedding, which I’m not invited to.  William is the same age as me yet looks about ten years older.  You’d think with all his money and clandestine lizard power he’d be able to get some stem cells injected into his face.  Perhaps he has and their main effect is to keep him in vaguely human form.  Or it may be that generations of inbreeding can make people go old and bald before their time.  The cost of one of their fancy-schmancy embroidered wedding napkins would pay for my entire wedding, plus the honeymoon, a large house, and all the food, holidays, and education to raise five children into adulthood; it’s a scandal.

I struggle to comprehend the fawning, cap-doffing, merchandise-buying obsession with the royal wedding.  No idea where it has come from or what purpose it serves.  99% of our lives no one gives a shit about them.  There was an embarrassing public howl of hysterical, self-pitying bleating when Diana popped off this mortal coil.  There is absolutely no interest what-so-ever in the Queen’s speech on Christmas day; in 29 years I haven’t seen it once, and I suspect there is a fair to middling chance that neither have you. 

Phillip and Camilla even moved the day of their wedding so the television coverage wouldn’t clash with Pope John Paul II’s funeral; this is bizarre beyond belief.  The British monarchy is an inherently anti-Catholic institution, and the Pope is a twisted little nobody.  The only reason for the change in scheduling can be a desperate admission that our own royal family rank so low in our minds that we’d rather glimpse at a picture of a box containing the corpse of an over-privileged bigot.  The next step is rescheduling a royal wedding so as not to clash with a particularly gripping episode of Coronation Street.

Anyway, good luck to them, but you know, stop making so much noise about it.  They are just people, and the only real privilege they deserve is to be first in line for the guillotine.

I never meant to end this post with a call for bloody anti-monarchist revolution, and I didn't.  It was a funny joke.