Serfing on a Wave of Royal Jubilation

What is everyone doing to celebrate the Jubilee? Painting a Union Jack on your pet dog’s face and then sending it to attack foreigners? Donning an Armani cap then fanning wads of cash at your economically disenfranchised neighbours as they die from scurvy before your very eyes? Having a family meal at Pizza Express in Woking? Sending warships to the Falkland Islands? However you choose to celebrate it, just remember – as you stand there snuffling your face into a bowl of Eton Mess or quaffing strawberry-bobbed flutes of Prosecco – that you’re perpetuating an archaic, deeply unfair system of class privilege that’s prevailed for millennia. You’re also teaching children everywhere to venerate wealth and hereditary titles above all else. But still. Wave your wee flag, eh?

Never mind the offensive ridiculousness of subsidising such an obscene occasion from the public purse when many millions have just been thumped below the poverty line like a crooked tent peg: why is the Royal Family still a thing, here in the supposedly enlightened 21st century? The Royal Family is like a sick old farm-dog that no-one quite has the heart to take out into the backyard and blow away with a 12-bore shotgun – which would almost certainly have happened if the owners had been French.

Gawd bless ya, mam

The Queen and I in happier times

I’ve listened to various vox pops and dispatches about the Queen over the last few weeks, and I’ve heard the usual sickening platitudes. Apparently she’s worked hard. She’s a grafter. As if she’d spent 70 years slaving down a mine with a pick-axe and a pit-canary, instead of travelling the world waving at people, and reading out an annual Christmas message to the nation with all the warmth and sincerity of a hostage reading their kidnappers’ demands. I guess, in a way, she is a hostage, trapped inside a high gilded cage, simultaneously looking down upon the stinking masses with a sneer of contempt on her face, as we in turn look up at her and her family like they’re sad, exotic animals in a zoo. It’s tempting to say that we’re all losers in this game, except they’re losers with scores of palaces and a multi-million pound fortune. If the Queen was really struggling with her gas bills they’d probably just let her burn Peckham to the ground.

Apparently the Queen is also like a mother to us all. Someone who’s spent 70 years ‘looking after us’. The people who say these things never cite specifics, mainly because they can’t. They’re just spewing out the sort of candied, bum-tonguing nonsense they feel is expected of them when asked questions about their ‘betters’. I’m being unfair here, though, because Auld Liz has reputedly got the common touch as well. So they say. Although quite what Simon the salt-of-the-earth scaffolder from the East End of London thinks he’s got in common with a nonagenarian who wears a million-pound hat on her head, and spends the year flitting between seven castles, is beyond me. What does he imagine they’d talk about over a few jars down The Queen’s Head?

Ayl tell you one theeng, Simon. One is ebsolootlee fucked. One’s spent all morning auditioning butlers for Sunday’s dinner with the Danish Royal Family.”

Bladdy tell me abaht it. We’ve ‘ad it up to eer wiv that showra mugs. Yoo wan’ anuver pint, sweet’art?”

Meek it a treble vodka. And one has some ching in the Range Rover.”

Phwoar! Must be amazin’ to snort some Colombian froo your own rolled-up face. Two’s up, darlin’!”

Ah, but I’m forgetting everything the Queen does for tourism, amn’t I? Clearly the UK would be an urban wasteland reminiscent of a deserted North Korean super-city if not for the Queen bringing in those visitors, who absolutely insist on a living Royal Family to complement their sight-seeing trips. After all, since the French murdered their Royal Family not a single foreigner has ever visited Paris. The Grand Canyon, too, suffered a severe drop in foot-fall when prospective visitors discovered that there were precisely zero monarchs living at the bottom of it. And they had to close Edinburgh Castle, because it just wasn’t the same being in a castle without the tantalising prospect of an old woman waving at you from a balcony.

Do you know, I stood outside that bloody Buckingham Palace for eight hours, EIGHT HOURS, and that snobby old bitch never ONCE came to the window. My mate Kev said he saw her doing juggling and show-tunes over the balcony when he was down here last year, and in 2018 my mate Bruce got a glimpse of her silhouette through the bathroom window as she was nudging out a shit.”

I’ll concede that the Queen does a lot for tourism when I see her handing out flyers for Pirate Island on Blackpool promenade.

Why does one give a shit?

I can understand the fawning obeisance towards the Royals exhibited by the masses back in the middle ages. If they hadn’t cheered for their King or Queen’s birthday they would have had their head lopped from their neck and kicked into a shrubbery. That’s a pretty strong incentive to celebrate. But now? The Royals may have a woolly, wholly symbolic constitutional role in our society, but their days of guillotining are over. For instance, I could dress a hyper-realistic Japanese sex doll up like the Queen and have it greedily fellate me as I sat on a throne made of burning fifty-pound notes, and the worst that would happen to me is that I’d probably get my own Netflix special. So why do people still behave as if they’re 13th century serfs?

I think I get it. I was scrolling through a megaton of flags and Jubilee articles on Facebook when I spied an online commenter, his profile-picture more flag than human, throwing his patriotic weight behind the Queen by charging forth with the rousing comment: ‘May she reign over us for another 50 years!’ I asked him to explain in what manner she reigned over us, and what precisely that reign entailed. Rather than engage with my question, he said: ‘Like her or not she is still your Queen so just be grateful your British.’ (The grammatical error, dear reader, was Mr Flag Face’s) This, I think, strikes at the heart of why so many people seem to deify the Queen. In their minds and hearts her reign is as immutable as it is unquestionable. It’s just something that is, was, and always will be: a holy trinity of traditionalism that fuels the wet dreams of conservatives with a small ‘c’ everywhere, not to mention Conservatives with a big ‘C’ – or C***s as they’re sometimes simply known.

All the pomp and pageantry of the Royal Family is absorbed into the soul of the flag-shagger like Sunday school psalms, or verses from the Quran, and defended just as unblinkingly. Their brain is a swirl of triggers, rituals and symbols, recalled and relayed by rote. For those of us who aren’t Royalists, an occasion such as this can make you feel as though you’ve woken up inside a 1950s sci-fi film, and everyone has been possessed by the tendrils of sinister space pods. What the fuck is everyone doing? Why can’t they see that their passion is misplaced to the point of absurdity; that they’re taking up metaphorical arms for a family who literally wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire?

It’s all so mad, so arbitrary. Like religion. Brain-washing. In some bizarre parallel universe there are crowds of middle-aged men being whipped into a violent frenzy by the unfurling of a giant banner with a picture of a carrot on it. Our universe is no less ridiculous for its grown men and women singing loudly and defiantly at scraps of cloth.

Childhood is where this eerie group-think begins. To paraphrase Aristotle – and indeed that, em, sage philosopher Adolph Hitler – you can inculcate anyone, anywhere, into any mode of thought imaginable, so long as you start them young. That’s why the government has spent £12m securing a boot-licking book on the Queen for every primary-age child, and why most of your kids have spent the last few weeks eating strawberries and colouring in pictures of the Queen’s million-pound crown with a one-pence pencil.

Know One’s Place

The Royal Family, much like death and taxes, appears to be a constant. In a rapidly changing world they’re an anchor to the imagined past, a world where everyone knew their place. You remember the hierarchy. It goes: The Queen; rich white men; rich white women; poor white men; dogs; cats; seahorses; cockroaches; anal warts; poor white women; AIDS; cancer, and, lastly, everyone everywhere else. And then brown and black people.

It’s about time we removed our white-lilly-tinted spectacles, and started to think – really, genuinely think – about the sort of world in which we want to live. The people we want to be, and the things we want to prioritise. Do we want a kinder, fairer society in which we all work to help those less fortunate than ourselves, or do we want to wave flags and throw money at the feet of a family who have enjoyed entitled and protected status since their ancestors first made a career out of executing peasants and looting the nation’s wealth? And who even now think nothing of withdrawing from the Bank of Peasantry to pay-off the victim of an underage sex scandal perpetrated by one of its members?

Happy Platty Joob Joobs everybody.

When Your Parents Read The Daily Mail

The Daily Mail and its alternately salacious and harrumphing Sunday counterpart The Mail on Sunday are Orwell’s five minutes’ hate morphed and expanded into tabloid form.

They are to the brain what a mallet is, em, also to the brain – a big, sturdy mallet painted red, white and blue, with each side of its face carrying conservative slogans, ranging from ‘We should bally well help our own first’ to ‘Help our own? They should bally well help themselves, you know, like I had to, by God!’.

The people who read The Mail have been bashed with this hammer so many times they don’t even realise they’re concussed any more, nor that they’re in danger of their brains leaking out from their ears to be smushed underfoot by their own wingtips or fluffy tartan slippers. It’s a comfort to them, that hammer. If it ever stopped thudding they might have to think for themselves, or possibly even be forced to give a shit about someone out-with the green and pleasant lands of their own, nostalgia-flooded recollections.

I’m possibly judging readers of The Mail too harshly, especially since my own parents count among that much-maligned readership. My parents’ reason for buying the paper in the first place doesn’t appear to have been ideological, though long exposure to its contents inevitably has certainly helped to shape their ideology. Whether The Mail planted right-wing sentiments in the egalitarian gardens of their minds or merely provided the necessary nutrients to allow certain long-buried seeds to grow is a matter of conjecture. I do know that when I was a teenager ‘The Independent’ was the family newspaper. Then it was The Times. And now it’s The Mail. A sort of steady slide from left to right. What comes next? A subscription to Breitbart? A signed photo of Nigel Farage and Katie Hopkins?

Their reason for becoming Mail readers was simply this: price. They don’t like things like The Sun or The Star, and beyond those tub-thumping, shit-and-tit-covered dish-rags, it’s the cheapest newspaper option out there. Beautiful, right? Bargain bigotry.

Each time I visit them I never pass up the opportunity to offer withering comments on their choice of ‘news’ – remembering always to pronounce those inverted commas around the word ‘news’. My mum tends to get angry when I chastise her, claiming that her choice of newspaper in no way informs her outlook on life, even though for many years now her mouth has been filled only with false teeth and Daily Mail headlines.

On my last visit I gave her a guided tour of the edition she had sitting on her kitchen counter-top.

Page three was taken up by a full-page splash about Ewan McGregor’s divorce, complete with corny Star Wars headline. So far, so Express. Next up, the Royal Family. Whereas The Express is still hung up on the ghost of Princess Diana, the Mail is pursuing an endless, obsessive vendetta against Meghan and Harry.

Now, I’m no fan of The Royal Family – I’m  something of a republican in that regard – but the vitriol handed out to those two turns one’s stomach. Mail readers are a curious breed. Many of them like to get the bunting out, and buy cups and saucers emblazoned with the visage of old Lizzy Lizard. Most of them probably own a tonne-weight of commemorative coins encapsulating such epoch-defining moments as Prince Phillip scratching his arse with a gilded shoe-horn or the Queen staring witheringly at a foreign dignitary.

These people clearly harbour a desire to go back in time, not to the knees-up-Mother-Brown, Blitz-tinged days of the 40s and 50s, but way, way back – five or six hundred years back – to experience the sheer joy of living as serfs under the boot of some tyrannical, maid-murdering, family-fucking monarch of the true dynastic golden age. ‘Be a priv’lige to have you shit in my worfless dead mouff, m’am.’

Elsewhere in the ‘newspaper’ there was an attack on Devi Sridhar, Professor and Chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh, misrepresenting an interview she gave to the New York Times about the differences between how the Scottish and UK governments have handled the coronavirus outbreak, which they topped off with the disingenuous and inaccurate headline: SNP AIDE BLAMES ENGLISH FOR RISE IN CASES’.

Never one to miss a chance to stick it to Labour, there was a piece on Jack Straw’s son blacking up. And another one with a headline straight out of The Daily Mash: DID CORBYN’S MARXIST HENCHMAN GIVE BORIS AND CUMMINGS VIRUS? Good question. Once you’ve answered that, let’s find out if Jeremy Corbyn intercepted the Roswell aliens, stole the recipe for AIDS from them, and then used it to sink the Titanic.

I knew this next headline would be divisive, given that my mother and I have polar opposite positions on both the SNP and Independence: ‘£30M BILL FOR SWINNEY’S U-TURN ON EXAMS FIASCO’. I could almost hear my mother’s face tightening into a scowl as I read it aloud.

This was the story of the Scottish Government apologising for allowing geography and socio-economics to have a more impactful influence on post-COVID student grades than the measured predictions of their teachers. Not ideal, though can you imagine The Mail’s headlines in some alternate universe where the Scottish government hadn’t at least made a token effort to compensate for the teaching profession’s very human impulse to be nice to their kids during these troubling times: ‘EVERYONE’S A WINNER in SNP SCOTLAND: CLASS OF 2020 CERTIFICATES NOT WORTH THE PAPER THEY’RE WRITTEN ON.’

However, in the face of evidence and dissent the government was big enough to concede that its methods, reasonings and results had been flawed. They then issued a full and frank apology, and then promised to make the appeal process quick and pain-free. And literally free. Which they did.

I guess if you were being uncharitable you could characterise that as a U-Turn, but genuine political U-Turns usually come with less apologies (usually nearer zero) and a million per cent more obfuscation. So, again: disingenuous framing.

Mum, however, wouldn’t accept any defence of John Swinney or the SNP . ‘I’ve always hated Alex Salmond,’ she said. I just shook my head and kept flicking the pages.

The most unforgivable piece in that day’s hell-rag was probably the one carrying this head-line: ‘SO WHY IS BBC HANDING YOUR LICENCE FEE TO THIS SLEAZY PEDDLER OF PORNOGRAPHY?’

BBC The Social commissions online videos from contributors on a wide range of themes and topics, ranging from humour and health, to inspirational stories and educational vignettes. The fee for having a video accepted and featured isn’t huge.

One of these occasional contributors, Mandy Rose Jones, whose content is predominantly focused on mental health and body image, also sells pictures and videos of herself through an adult on-line portal called AdmireMe.

Both this site and the lady herself are unaffiliated with the BBC. Nevertheless, the poor girl was horse-whipped across two pages, as The Mail held her up as some sort of pervasive sexual deviant out to warp the nation’s kids. The article was nothing less than ritual humiliation, the modern equivalent of burning witches at the stake. A spurious, offensive diatribe. What this woman chooses to do online – as long as it’s legal – has no bearing whatsoever on the videos she produces for BBC The Social. And for all that it matters, which it doesn’t at all, no-one would’ve known about Mandy’s presence on AdmireMe had the Mail not chosen to turn her into collateral damage in their ongoing ideological war against the BBC.

The Mail is a hateful, gossip-filled tabloid that lends the illusion of a broadsheet. To make stupid people feel clever; and important. If this newspaper were a person it would be a dead donkey with the face of Katie Hopkins. It’s disingenuous, dirty, despicable, deceitful and disgusting. And I wish my parents wouldn’t buy it.

‘Come on, son,’ my mum said to me, with a proud and wounded look on her face. ‘What am I supposed to do? Buy The Daily Record?’

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just closed the newspaper and walked away.

Movie Review – The Queen’s Corgi

The Queen’s Corgi is such a tonally discordant movie that watching it risks dislocating your amygdala. Its ideas, scenarios and moods ping across the screen like balls in a haunted pinball machine, careening into the flashing, dinging pads of plot, theme and character with such vicious speed that it’s hard to know whether you should be laughing, wincing, praying or reporting yourself to Childline for letting your kids watch it in the first place.

The movie begins with the kindly and considerate Prince Phillip gifting a Corgi puppy to the cooing and gushingly maternal Queen Elizabeth. There’s your first note of discordance. Everything’s predicated upon the falsehood that Prince Phillip and Queen Elizabeth are nice, regular, normal people just like you and me, and not, respectively, a maniacal, fox-blasting, dead-eyed, colonial throwback and a bejewelled joyless void who delivers her annual Christmas message to the nation with all the warmth and conviviality of a statue being held at gun-point.

It’s a strange time to be putting a soft sheen on one of the world’s most prolific hoarders of hereditary wealth. The United Kingdom is on the cusp of a no-deal Brexit, a potentially seismic event with the power to unite the lower and middle-classes in an orgy of hardship and poverty; consequently, I found it pretty tough to empathise with a character who, towards the end of the movie, greets a fire in her palace with the merest of shrugs. To put things in perspective: I almost had a rage-related stroke when I found out the price of the family-sized tub of popcorn. Mind you, the creative forces behind this movie are Belgian, so maybe rubbing the UK’s face in the truth of its own fawning subservience in the run-up to Brexit was a deliberate and, on balance, very funny thing to do.

The opening portion of the movie shows us Rex’s life as the Queen’s most adored Corgi and wearer of the coveted Top Dog collar [In the UK, Rex is voiced by Jack Whitehall, about whom the kindest thing I can say is, ‘At least he’s not James Corden.’].

If Rex is high on the Queen’s pedestal, then he’s positively subterranean in the considerations of everyone else at the palace: Prince Phillip resents the pampered pooch for supplanting him in the Queen’s hierarchy of affections; the Queen’s head servant is disgusted at having to demean himself in the service of a bolshy dog [at one point the poor little man has to follow the dog around the garden holding an umbrella over its head so it doesn’t get wet, only to be deliberately pissed on for his trouble – and that, to me, is a perfect allegory for the Royal Family’s feelings towards its supposed subjects]; but no person or group in Buckingham Palace hates the prissy little pillock as much as his canine bunk-mates, who variously bemoan him, despair of him and, eventually, actively try to murder him.

Things start to go wrong for Rex – as it does for most people – as soon as President Donald Trump arrives. Trump comes to the palace as part of a state visit along with his First Lady, Melania, and their First Dog, Mitzi, the latter a preening, pampered, cossetted little bitch who’s only in it for the money [hush now, be nice].

While Trump is the butt of many jokes during his short time on-screen – about his hands, his hair, his tone-deaf braggadocio and, obscenely for a kids’ film, his rape allegations – he’ll almost certainly come across to kids as a lovable, eccentric oaf, a far cry from the hateful, narcissistic demagogue we big people know and loathe from the almost daily deluge of unhinged pronouncements we’re exposed to through the media. Making Trump cuddly again is a strange creative choice, on a par with putting a cartoon Hitler in a kids’ film, and making him a smiling, jazz-loving juggler who cares for sick cats.

In the spirit of re-cementing the so-called special relationship, the Queen agrees to marry off Rex to the Trumps’ beloved Mitzi, precipitating a highly unsettling sequence in which Mitzi chases a terrified Rex around the palace ostensibly attempting to rape him; an X-rated, reverse Pepe le Pew, if you will.

It’s genuinely upsetting, and not something to which I was comfortable exposing my young children, aged 2 and 5. I’m no lily-livered snowflake, folks. I’ve let my kids watch Watership Down, the original Hellboy Movies and Shazam. I believe that while movie violence can be downplayed and even laughed at when it’s cartoonish in tone, and death is a sad and irreducible part of life to which kids are inevitably introduced through movies – and usually kids’ movies at that – their first grapples with the idea of sex and romance shouldn’t be filtered through the prism of a terrifying sexual assault, regardless of which gender is leading the charge. Another reason why Trump’s inclusion in the movie, given both his history and Mitzi’s behaviour, is weirdly inappropriate.

After Rex accidentally bites Trump in the cock [OK, I enjoyed that bit], resulting in Trump and his hellish entourage roaring off in a huff, Rex finds himself out of favour with The Queen. Although quite why Rex would still exalt her after she sanctioned him for a raping is anybody’s guess, and just another of the movie’s myriad baffling character motivations. Rex ends up banished and betrayed by fellow Corgi, Duke, who leads him away from the palace and tries to drown him in a freezing river, thereafter fabricating a blood-and-fur crime scene in the palace grounds so that none of the humans are moved to look for him.

Rex ends up at the local pound, and quickly falls for Wanda, a dog of regular stock who only reciprocates his feelings once she see’s able to confirm Rex’s identity as property of the palace, aka absolutely minted. Strike two against my children’s burgeoning psycho-sexual development. Thanks, movie.

Unfortunately for Rex, winning Wanda’s heart and escaping back to the palace won’t be easy, because the pound cum prison functions by night as a vicious doggy fight-club, and Wanda is the main squeeze of a raging pile of working-class muscle called Tyson (voiced, somewhat inevitably, by Ray Winstone), the pound’s top dog.

The power of friendship doesn’t quite triumph over the power of violence, given that it’s Rex’s growing friendships within the pound that give him access to the violence he needs in order to defeat Tyson, but at this point I don’t think anyone – least of all me – was expecting any sanguine, family-friendly messages. Generally, though, when the movie isn’t busy being tonally inappropriate, it’s busy being incredibly formulaic.

Rex, along with Wanda and an assortment of dogs of all creeds, shapes and sizes, return to the palace to teach Duke a lesson, namely in allowing him to be crowned Top Dog so that the Queen will send him off to America to get repeatedly raped by Donald Trump’s dog. Em… great, I guess. Yep. That’s… that’s fine. The Queen, in another uncharacteristic bout of woman-of-the-people-ness decides to let Rex’s low-class friends and girlfriend remain at the palace with him to live happily ever after, which it’s just possible is a reference to Meghan Markle joining the Royal Household, but might just be an attempt to salvage some sort of a happy ending from the rather horrible rape coda.

I’ve had a stab at condensing the movie’s moral message. Here goes… What the film appears to be saying is, if ever you let your privilege go to your head and become callous and arrogant and unpopular with your peers, you might just need the humbling experience of almost being raped as part of an arranged marriage scheme to show you the error of your ways. And if you do end up in a prison fight-club for poor people owing to the actions of a jealous peer, then never forget that you can get your revenge on them by seeing to it that they’re raped and deported in your place.

Did you get all that, kids? Lovely, isn’t it?

All told, this movie might make your kids laugh in some places, and gasp in others, and the animation is certainly bright, clean and fluid enough to hold their interest, but if you’re looking for a warm and fuzzy classic to watch with your kids, you’d be better off considering full-blown grown-up movies like The Shining or Reservoir Dogs. At least they don’t pretend to be nice or wholesome.

And, perhaps crucially, neither of them have Donald Trump in them.

THE VERDICT

out of a possible

Em, you know the Royals aren’t the underdogs, right?

I’m largely ambivalent about the Royal Family as a collection of human beings, but none-the-less wish them every health and happiness. I just wish they’d pursue health and happiness on their own time and (if I can be excused an Americanism) dime. Part of me can’t believe that we still have things like royal families in this supposedly more enlightened age. I guess privilege is a hard thing to give up, for its flag-waving worshippers as much as those weaned on it.

Despite this ambivalence my last two posts have been reasonably brutal, very childish and none-too-subtle send-ups of the monarchy and Harry’s wedding, shot through with a cold, caustic, all-consuming anger. I’ve been thinking about this, and I’m certain that my anger is a reaction to the Royals being cast in the twin roles of saviours and victims, in the newspapers and on social media respectively. For the Royals are clearly poor, noble souls who shouldn’t have to put up with mean-spirited criticisms and name-calling from us proles when all they’re trying to do is inspire us with their diamond-studded benevolence.

Again, I don’t hate any of the Royals individually, but I do hate political, social and economic systems that encourage the veneration of inherited wealth at the expense of compassion. I also hate viral posts like the one below, one of scores I came across in the run up to Harry’s big day:

This sort of thing acts as kerosene upon my anger and indignation.

In a nutshell, the man above would rather help finance a Royal wedding than continue to support free healthcare provisions for Kelly-Anne’s children. He doesn’t elaborate too much on Kelly-Anne’s socio-economic position, but I’d wager she’s a stand-in for poor single mothers everywhere. We all know the short-hand. We’re all used to hearing the beat of that particular drum. Beat, beat, beat, down upon the heads of the poorest and most vulnerable among us.

Michael’s a military man, so I can understand why he would be ready to praise (what he perceives as) Prince Harry’s valour; why he’d want to gravitate towards people who’d endured some of the same extraordinary life experiences. The sharp end of the military must give soldiers such a powerful sense of symbiosis that once it’s taken away it must make society appear in contrast a dark, lonely, incomprehensible place.

In any case, whether the Prince’s presence in Afghanistan was part of a risky PR stunt orchestrated by Clarence House to raise the Royals’ profile among serving soldiers and those who support them, or whether it stemmed from Harry’s genuine desire to break with modern tradition and serve on the front line, there’s no doubt that it takes great reserves of bravery to enter a combat zone. I certainly don’t possess such bravery, and have no desire ever to acquire it, for reasons of not wanting my bollocks shot off.

But to suggest that Prince Harry’s brief stint in Afghanistan somehow makes him a better, braver, more worthy human being, not just more worthy than Kelly-Anne, but more worthy than all those actively serving in the military (after all, why isn’t our tax money paying for their weddings?) is elite-scented jingoism at its finest.

How many times has it been implied that while the dynastic millionaires deserve our sympathy and support for having been born into the thankless ranks of privilege, the disadvantaged have only themselves to blame for squandering their opportunities and not making the most out of life? This sort of deeply conservative thinking presupposes a level-playing field, something that has never existed in our societies, and perhaps never will, certainly as long as this deeply unsettling world-view persists.

Whether it sprouts from naïve aspiration or deluded arrogance, a lot of middle-and-low-income royalists profess a greater kinship with the 1%  than those suffering a rung or two below them on the socio-economic ladder. The reality is that the vast majority of people – those who weren’t birthed on to an ever-unfolding red carpet of privilege – are only ever one bad day away from losing everything.

The newspapers’ propaganda doesn’t help. They promulgate a yin and yang view which sees the elite venerated and the poor condemned. The tabloids, which claim to serve the interests of the working classes, are usually owned by billionaires and staffed by the affluent middle-classes, a cross-class collusion that keeps the ‘lower’ classes at each other’s throats.

Bluntly, the Royal Family neither needs nor deserves our protection from criticism. And it certainly doesn’t need – or deserve – our money.

However we feel about ourselves, or the Harrys and Elizabeths and Kelly-Annes of this world, we must never forget the direction in which our sympathy and compassion should always travel: everywhere.

But especially sideways.

And down.

An Interview with Queen Elizabeth II

Name? The Queen

Occupation? Being queen

What’s that like? It’s a lot like not being the Queen, except with hundreds of millions in inherited wealth and a strong sense of class superiority over everyone else in the country.

What brings you the greatest joy? Eating swans. Who’s going to fucking stop me?

What would be the title of your autobiography? I’m on the Money.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given? “Make it look like an accident.”

Prince Phillip is famous for his gaffes, usually involving race. What’s been your favourite one? When he shot our African gardener.

[silence]

It’s okay. He wasn’t hurt. He was absolutely fine. Well, he staved his finger a little, but it didn’t stop him from going out shooting the next day.

Moving on… If you had a tattoo, where would it be? [puzzled look] I do have a tattoo. It’s at Edinburgh castle.

Some would say that your answer to the previous question reeks of privilege. Some should be more mindful of the ‘dark forces’ I keep telling everyone about.

[PHILLIP SHOUTS FROM THE OTHER ROOM] ‘You mean the Indian Army?’

Do fuck off, Phillip!

Who do you miss most? Definitely Camilla. She’s always standing just a little bit too far away when the blunderbuss goes off.

What makes you smile? Nothing. Literally nothing. [thinks] Cows? I guess cows are alright.

Why don’t you smile more often? If you had to sit on a balcony each and every year watching as Joe Pasquale brings the cast of Casualty on stage to sing the hits of Abba dressed as air hostesses, you wouldn’t be smiling either. That, and I’m a 90-year-old woman. Most of my energy goes into not pishing myself. One careless twitch of the lips could turn me into Noel’s gunge tank.

Plus, smiling’s been selectively bred out of my genetic line over the last few hundred years. I can’t tell you how much it’s saved Princess Anne on botox. 

What charity do you support? The ‘Keeping Prince Andrew Out of Jail’ charity.

What is your greatest indulgence? Everything, bitches.

What’s your greatest regret? Fergie turning down those complimentary tickets I gave her for a weekend in Paris.

What is on your bucket list? [shakes head] One calls it a Diamante Treasure Chest list.

There’s that elitist vibe again… So what do you want to do before you die? Find another host body.

What???? I mean… em…visit the pyramids.

What are the last three items on your credit card statement? A Faberge Eggcup; professional hit-man; Canada.

What’s your favourite TV show? Game of Thrones. One loves to remember the good old days.

What’s on your nightstand? A knight. What else would one put there?

You can hear yourself, right? Next question: Dark chocolate or milk chocolate?

[PHILLIP SHOUTS FROM THE OTHER ROOM] William’s wedding was definitely better!

Fuck off, Phillip!

What is one thing people would be surprised to learn about you? That I’m definitely *not* an ancient reptile from a distant planet who has come here along with hundreds of my kind to enslave the human race, breed them and eventually devour them like a pile of chicken drumsticks at one of Fergie’s barbecues.

Did you kill Diana? Ye… [wags finger] Nice try, fucko.

Any other fun facts you’d like to share? One’s real name is actually Queeny McQueen Face.

Dogs or cats? Well, one of them is subservient, and the other is cold and aloof. How can one choose between one’s favourite qualities? We’ll call it a tie.

What’s the hardest part about being a mum? Interviewing people for the position of chief nanny interviewer.

Last phone call you made? Elton John, to ask if he had one more ‘Candle in the Wind’ in him.

How do you feel about the controversy with Rolf Harris? Oh disgusting. Disgusting. I don’t know how he can live with himself.

It’s horrible, isn’t it? Of course! It was the worse portrait I’ve ever seen.

No… erm, not the… Not the painting he did of you. The… you know? [blank face] Oh, the thing with the kids? [shrugs] Meh. Yeah. I guess that was kind of bad?

Any plans to retire? [laughs, but without moving her face] When I die I’m going to make sure the staff carry my corpse around and pretend I’m still alive, like ‘Weekend at Bernies’, so that jug-eared cunt of a son of mine never gets the throne.

What’s your strongest feature? My right arm. I do so much waving I’m basically Popeye. It’s left Poor Philip’s cock looking like a crushed Flump.

Who’s your biggest celebrity crush?

[PHILLIP SHOUTS FROM THE OTHER ROOM] Diana!

Fuck off, Phillip!

What do you think when people call you and your extended family a bunch of spongers? We bring in about £55 billion pounds in tourism every year. [scratches head] Or is it £5.68? I have absolutely no concept of money. What I do know is that people will travel thousands and thousands of miles just to stand outside my expensive house waiting for a glimpse of my gloved hand at the window. I’m the Windsor’s Wacko Jacko, Sha-mone! [grabs crotch] Hee hee!

Maybe if the French hadn’t guillotined their Royal Family they’d get more tourists in Paris. Actually, I’ll give the French that. They’re awesome at helping to assassinate Royals…

What did you think of Harry’s wedding? I… eh. I… um. [Queen yanks an axe out from her jacket, spins around, and hurls it at the wall, embedding it in a promo poster for ‘Suits’] It was lovely.

Finally, are you sure you aren’t a shape-shifting reptile? I mean, it makes sense. Elizabeth = Lizard. Camilla = Chameleon. Princess Anne = Princess Anaconda. Don’t be ridiculous. [The Queen’s eye pops out of its socket, and she catches it with her lizard tongue] You should probably just ignore that.  

**DISCLAIMER – IT’S POSSIBLE THAT NONE OF THIS HAPPENED**

The Rain in June Falls Mostly on the Toon: Grangemouth Gala Day 2012

We just don’t do carnivals, fairs or fetes with as much aplomb or on the same grand scale as the Americans. Maybe it would help if we smiled occasionally, but we’re genetically incapable of such a facial contortion. We Scots would only smile if God proved his existence once and for all by a) reaching a thumb from Dover to Berwick and squashing the English like woodlice, and then b) rounding off the miracle by replacing the North Sea with heroin.

Or, at a pinch, we’d smile if there was a special episode of ‘You’ve Been Framed’ in which each and every video featured David Cameron being stabbed in the balls by a different angry dwarf in a kilt.

Yes, the Americans like a good smile. If the Grangemouth Gala Day was held in California, USA, (which would be rather unlikely, I’m forced to admit) it would be a non-stop, 24-hour, noisy orgasm of vim, streamers, colour, mariachi bands and pomp, featuring half-naked back-flipping pom-pom girls – with smiles so blinding they could down aircraft – jiggling their breasts with the enthusiasm of a force 4 earthquake. There would be a 50ft-tall animatronic Mickey Mouse shooting fireworks out of its bell-end into the hungry, gaping mouth of a robot Pluto, as sixteen million children wept with joy. And somewhere, somehow, there would be guys in red bell-boy jackets playing trumpets on the backs of motorbikes – upside down and through their arses.

This year, in Grangemouth, Scotland, the Grangemouth Gala Day looked like… well, it looked like exactly what it was: a procession of miserable cunts in anoraks shuffling through the rain in search of the most suitable cliff for an act of mass suicide. It looked like there’d been a delivery of crepe paper and face-paints to a funeral march. If you haven’t visited Grangemouth before and find yourself wondering what it looks like, have a gander at the drug-riddled communities in HBO’s ‘The Wire’, but imagine that everybody’s white.

So What is the Gala Day?

Well, it’s technically a Children’s Day, which makes me a bit of a cock for slating it. It’s not really meant to be enjoyed by the likes of me, childless interloper that I am. What’ll I be doing next? Telling you how shit I found the latest episode of Sesame Street because it wasn’t nearly as good as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?

The galas themselves started off as annual celebrations for miners and mining communities, but the focus of the celebrations was shifted for the following wonderful reason:

In the late Nineteenth century, some Miners’ Gala Days were given over to children in order to reduce drunkenness.

Resources for Learning in Scotland website

And we all know how successful a strategy that turned out to be. Here’s the zinger:

Gun Terror of Oilman 

A teenage thug pointed a gun at the head of a man who told him off for breaking bottles in a kids’ play area.

Gary Martin told 45-year-old oil rig worker Jim Kelly: ‘You’re dead.’

But Mr Kelly grappled Martin to the ground and got the air pistol off him, Falkirk Sheriff Court heard yesterday.

The terror attack happened on Grangemouth Gala Day in June.

Lawyer Andy Bryson said Martin was ‘exceedingly drunk’ at the gala day.
www.thefreelibrary.com

Ah, yes. The only flaw in that plan was that by 2012 all of the children would be alcoholics, too. Alcohol does indeed still play a huge part in the Grangemouth Gala Day. Like they say of the 1960s: if you can remember what happened, then you weren’t actually there. Grangemouth has other things in common with the 1960s, in that it’s full of incredibly racist people with shite haircuts taking drugs and having unfussy sex with strangers.

(actually, a joke I used to tell on-stage about Grangemouth is that it’s a lot like Amsterdam: in that it’s completely flat, and filled with drugs and whores.)

So What Happens ‘an That?

No smart alec remarks: this arch is pretty fucking cool. And The Muppets was the only TV show that made me shut up as a child.

What happens is this: each year a ‘royal family’ is assembled from one of the local primary schools, a different school having the honour of doing this each year until it’s back to the start of the cycle again. Kids at the year’s chosen school are then asked if they’d like to volunteer themselves to be one of the gala’s persons of special significance. Those who do are then whittled down by their schoolmates by means of a popularity contest, until each of the main roles are filled: Queen, Ladies in Waiting, Paiges, a Flower Queen etc.

The girl elected Queen (Republicans take note) then has the arduous task of selecting just one of her classmates to be sealed inside a BMW and slammed into a wall by a drunk driver. OK, I made that bit up.

There’s no King of the Gala Day, but one lucky boy does get to be the Prince, whose role it is to follow the Queen around muttering increasingly unhelpful racist remarks. OK, I made that bit up, too. But they should introduce that role. It’d be so easy to find viable candidates amongst the people of Grangemouth.

Dustbin Beaver is actually slang for a Grangemouth girl.

The parents of ‘the royals’ then have to spend £80 million trillion pounds building an arch display over their homes. If they’re poor, they simply steal the necessary materials, or just selotape bits of A4 paper that read: ‘ALL HAYL THE QUEAN’ to their windows. Some of the displays are incredible. You know, fairy-tale castles, enchanted forests, 1940s cinemas. And some of them are shit.

On the day itself – where it’s usually raining despite the event taking place towards the end of June – trucks filled with children (that makes it sound like a pogrom: no concentration camps are involved), and floats prepared by other schools and local businesses, and pipe bands, and brass bands, and veterans, and such like, all form a long procession through the streets, before arriving in the central park for the crowning ceremony. And, as we’ve already established, lots of people get drunk.

Oh, and there are lots of flags everywhere. Or bunting, as they call it. Which sounds to me a little too much like a sex act. And a jolly good one at that.

In closing, as I’ve already stated, it’s actually a grand day out for the folks of Grangemouth, especially for those with relatives taking part in the procession. And some of the arches have been super-awesome in this and previous years, as you’ll see from the pictures below. (OK, part of this, like with the Skinflats article, is life-insurance, but I mean it, too, honest!) Actually, my niece was in the procession this year, and she was awesome, so get that roond ye.

GALLERY

Graceland in Grangemouth, circa 2008.

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And, of course, this happens at the Grangemouth Gala Day shows every year, and must be shared with the world:

BEHOLD… COBO! Urban dance legend of Grangemouth! Enjoy the video…

watch?v=x_pcZctvizQ