Cry God for Harry…!

There are times when one would like one’s partner to take a little bit more notice. Everyday life is full of the mundane, and the necessary, and often with very little glamour. There might be something important going on but the drudgery and the distractions of little things are apt to blind us to realities. Getting attention these days is not easy unless you are the President of the United States who has cornered that market. Glitz or Celebrity is possibly the way to go, if you wish to avoid the Trumpian method of bombast and narcissistic stupidity.

I have tried cooking breakfast wearing a tutu, a leopard skin thong and a little bit of glitter glued to my nipples, while also dancing around to the sound track of Mama Mia! on a cold drizzly Sunday morning, in an attempt to inject a little of the ‘Strictly’ magic, and to draw her gaze up from the ipad. This was as successful as fishing for compliments about one’s new Sassoon haircut during the Poll tax riots.

“Darling, the kitchen’s on fire!” I’d joke as the bacon spittles in the frying pan. This comment was greeted by a wall of silence that could block out the sound of a nuclear explosion.

“Chicken lickin has just told me the sky is falling in, there is a pus pox pestilence ravishing the countryside and the powers of Mordor have found the ring”.

Silence.

However, just mention the goings on in the House of Windsor and suddenly attention is turned to 11. The current spat concerns a millionaire couple’s decision to move to Canada and to stop playing at dressing up and burning the prols. The new story has taken the heat off a certain Prince’s prediliction for self absorption and a little light hymen stretching in dimly lit but opulent New York apartments, once owned by the sort of man who ruled countries or who ran large multinational corporations whose business model involved child slavery, sex trafficking and peddling propaganda.

The story is so serious that the whole of the UK press and broadcast media have gone into meltdown trying to cover every single angle possible. We have a bit of casual racism, tenderised with misogyny, spite and obnoxous obseqiousness. We have been told there is something called Frogmore House, a ‘cottage’ paid for by the tax payer with enough bedrooms to house the residents of Grenfell Tower. Remember them? No, of course not because they have all been rehoused in happy luxury in Henley-on-Thames and other nice home counties towns as the largesse of the State has been poured in their direction. They will be reading their morning papers, sipping freshly squeezed orange juice at breakfast while their staff do the cleaning. They’ll be warning their teenage daughters about the dangers of either marrying princes or being left alone with one after a line of coke and a bottle of fizz in Mustique or the 30 room Royal Lodge in Windsor.

Harry has had the temerity to marry a woman who might want to have a say in her life. Fancy that! Oh, and she is a bit…you know…well, let’s just say “American” shall we?

There must be absolutely fuck all happening elsewhere in the UK or the world as the journalists vie with each other to discuss the finer points of Royal protocol and history. It is as if they are trying to distract us from something, or to fill our heads with so much trash as to elbow out any critical thinking about the baseless anachronist nature of Monarchy in the first place.

‘Monarchy’. Yes…it is 2020. You’d think? An institution as much revered by the proletariat as it is by the chinless wonders of the denizens of Downton Abbey and their numerous illigitimate offspring now living in Hamstead and Kensington. I’d have thought that by now we would have grown out of our childish habits and interests in the same way we gave up sucking at mother’s breast, pulling the legs off spiders and exploring the deeper, dark, hidden parts of our bodies with small household objects and vaseline. Just me?

I’ve as much interest in the intra-familial squabblings goings on of millioniare landowners and their sprogs as I have in the spring mating rituals of the common or garden earthworm. I do want to know how much wealth they have, how they got it, who protects it, what justifies it and how many animals die in the process. It might be of interest to know if the Queen is still alive or if a body double has been recruited just to piss off Charles, or whether Philip is planning to emulate Mountbatten in organising a coup against anyone with a funny northern or foreign accent and vaguely dark skin, or how many sixth form precosiously matured schoolgirls have been invited to tea at Andrew’s without their fathers’ knowledge.

We will not be told, because they want us watching a soap opera instead.

Meanwhile, back in the kitchen I finally got her attention by popping the cork on a bottle of fizz, a sound her ears are finely attuned to.