the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Well thank Darwin that’s over.

Ten days of endless wittering about the monarchy, the ‘service’ of the dead one and the challenges of the new one. Of nauseatingly banal opinions of the ‘royal watchers’, who conveniently gloss over the obvious fact that the subject of their trivia had had to die in order to grant them their fifteen minutes. The experiences of people who thought that just because they’d had a fleeting encounter with her as she was doing something or other, that that brief interaction was somehow an indication of her inner sel that they had to tearfully share. The obsequiousness of the print media and their online iterations as the churned out a seemingly inexhaustible supply of forelock tugging toadyism. The queues of the misguided, thinking that their spending hours in order that they might glance at her coffin meant something other than that they’d been deluded. The assumption that the entire nation was united in such a profound and abiding sense of grief that a return to ‘normal’ is unthinkable.

And from a certain view, it is. If one thinks about what constitutes a return to normality, what with its cost of existing crisis and a government both incapable and unwilling to do anything much about it, public sector workers discontent over their wages manifesting in strikes that make those services provide less of a service, a climate emergency that this government thinks will be helped by resuming fracking, increasing drilling for North Sea oil and signalling and end to some green initiatives. As if that weren’t bad enough, there’s the war in Ukraine and Vlad the Mads’ threat of nuclear war. I could go on, but I think the point is clear; normality sucks.

What should replace normality, is regicide on a scale commensurate such that Britain would be plunged headlong into endless repetition of the last fortnight, until Christmas at least. What better act of public service could the monarchy provide than by dying on a regular basis so we can all forget about normality and all the attendant misery that goes with it and instead focus on something else? After all we are constantly told that we live in a post truth world, one where reality is whatever we want it to be, so why ever not? Come on, who would really miss any of them, apart that is from their flunkeys, hangers on and lickspittles. Have any one of them made even a scintilla of a worthwhile contribution to anything? Done something that has made a real difference in the real world? Something of note as opposed to having their picture on the back of one?

One of them could die, there’d be a repeat of what just happened (albeit on not such a grand scale), a collective pause as the nation steadied itself and then repeat. Over and over and over. With judicious timing this could last well into the New Year, when the NHS winter crisis will be over and Englands ignominious early exit crashing out early from the World Cup will be forgotten. In fact, so many of them crawled out from their taxpayer funded privilege in recent days, we could keep this going until Easter. Then it’d be the slimmest of slim pickings, but needs must if we are to keep reality at bay. Given as how the country seems to love the monarchy, as the last few days have illustrated, I wouldn’t be all that shocked if Esme adopted regicide as a flagship government policy, in much the same way that Paul Daniels used Debbie McGee.