A Right Royal Carve Up

I couldn't care less about the royal wedding.

No doubt a fair chunk of you will read that and think that you feel the same ("Hear hear! Couldn't agree more. I can't stand those undemocratic, antiquarian inbred shits!"). But you don't. Protesting against the notion of the wedding is still caring about it, just in a different direction. I on the other hand feel sweet nothing about the wedding. I'm like a mother with post-natal stress watching her newborn being slowly neglected in a corner. If the newborn happened to be inbred.

I suppose I feel a token sense of goodwill toward the couple. I hope it works out for them. I really do. Yes, he's a royal, and yes, she's hardly been raised on a plastic spoon, but from where I can see they look like basically decent, well-meaning people. If inbred ones.

They're giving their wedding-donations to charity. He's losing his hair, which gives him a slightly tragic and relatable air. He's the only royal to have visited Australia since they got their first phoneline. And everyone gets a day off.

(Well not me of course; as the rest of the country sits in front of the telly on Friday morning getting pleasantly shit-faced, I'll be doing a three hour exam on Anglo-Saxon poetry. Which means I still have to hang out with a bunch of royals of questionable breeding, except these ones keep making 20-line speeches before keeling over and I lose marks if I spell their names wrong. So count yourselves lucky.)

Stereotype dictates I should be a republican, but to be honest I can't really see much wrong with the royals. They cost us relatively little in taxes, bring us millions in tourism, provide endless tabloid fodder, do a hell of a lot of charity work, and eminate a pungent sense of 'Englishness'. I'm not for one minute a patriot, but it's nice to think that at our nations heart lies this family of deformed and clueless bigots. It's almost like a fairytale. The alternative is some godawful presidential thing which would land us twice the national amount of crap about "being a leader who cares" and "working together for a better country." Give me the goose-steppers any day.

I can't, on the other hand, get excited about the wedding. It's not in my nature. I think it's the patriotism. People complain about the lack of patriotism in this country, but the fact is we're not very good at it. The Irish are great at patriotism; they make being Irish seem fun, like a big sham-rocky, Guinness-y party. We make Britain sound like the sort of party held by the lobotomised-trainspotter's club. We don't even have the substandard 'land of the free, home of the brave' tropes that America thrives on. Just a flag, now primarily associated with a raving fascist party, and those truly unsettling 'commemorative plates' and other such memorabilia. Royal wedding souvenirs are the creepiest things ever made. All the photos seem strangely dead-eyed. They follow you around the room. They look like the sort of thing Fred West would eat his victim's skin off. I know Fred West didn't eat his victim's skin, but no doubt he'd take it up just to get his money's worth from the plate. Brrrrr.

Yes, well, in summary, I don't care about the wedding. At all. Which is why I've just spent seven paragraphs discussing it. Which makes sense in my head. What can you say, I've been translating Anglo Saxon all day.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go and top-up my Royal wedding mug up with some more orphan blood.