Queen Elizabeth II is now our longest reigning monarch. Whoop de fucking do. So inevitably the monarchy is all over the news and social media. And oh, Jesus, now I’m writing about them, too.
People get their knickers in a twist about the monarchy. Are they good or are they bad? Or are they perhaps some other thing? (Sorry, I wasn’t listening). Should we curtsey? Should we have them murdered like they did in Russia?
Personally, I struggle to think of anything less important to worry about. I see them as essentially a shower of emotionally and physically caged fuck-cousins who act as a constant reminder that my own life is vastly preferable.
You may be tempted to regard them as Deserters par excellence but even the most cursory analysis reveals that their lives have gone to rat-shit. They can wash their feet in Champagne and eat caviar sandwiches all they like but they can never pop down the pub to meet some mates, or go to the game and call the ref a fat twat, or go to a gig and smoke weed by some bins, or drink the last of the brandy and fall asleep in their pants on the sofa during Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. And that’s just what I did yesterday.
No, they’re up at dawn donning collars and corsets to spend days glad-handing po-faced officials in Gibraltar or Perth. What the fuck? No-one in their right minds would swap places with them.
And yet there remains so much about them to cherish and admire.
Economic benefit
Each year millions of vacant, bloated tourists flood into my city and stand for hours blocking pavements while gorging on outsized bars of Cadbury’s chocolate and drinking baked beans straight from the Snap Pot, just to get a glimpse of royal cold shoulder. It is these simple folk that allow a legion of plastic flag sellers to send their children to the finest schools in Britain.
I once commented to a street food vendor on Whitehall, from whose cart I was lunching, that he was wearing a lot of gold jewellery. ‘I glint in the fucking dark,’ he said. ‘God save the fucking Queen!’
Andrew’s nickname
As has recently been made public, royal protection officers routinely give nicknames to those they’re looking after. The Queen is ‘The Purple One’, for example, while Prince Philip is referred to as ‘The Greek’.
Prince Andrew is known as ‘The Cunt’.
Princess Anne’s reaction to being kidnapped
When loony loner, Ian Ball, attempted to force Princess Anne from her car at gunpoint in 1974, having already shot three men in front of her, her response reminds us of what it is to be British:
‘Not bloody likely,’ she told him, and sat tight.
Prince Philip reminds me of my father
‘If it doesn’t fart or eat hay then she isn’t interested,’ said Prince Philip of Princess Anne, his daughter, and he can barely open his mouth without some cringeworthy, bigoted balls spewing out, just like my good old pop:
To the President of Nigeria, in traditional dress: ‘You look like you’re ready for bed.’
On being told by a female Sea Cadet that she worked in a club: ‘Is it a strip club?’
‘British women can’t cook’
When accepting a gift from a woman during a visit to Kenya: ‘You are a woman, aren’t you?’
To a Scottish driving instructor on a visit to Oban: ‘How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?’
To a group of British students in China: ‘If you stay here much longer, you’ll all be slitty-eyed.’
It’s obvious the daft old coot thinks he’s being hilarious but in reality the only funny thing about his comments is that he thinks it’s acceptable to say them out loud, despite all that breeding.
They’re animal lovers
If it wasn’t for the yachts-full of cash that the world’s royal families pour into the money pit of horse-racing it’s likely that there would be no such thing as that most stupendous of skives, a day at the races. For this alone, we should surely stand with our heads bowed, holding our rolled up caps in our hands.
The Queen doesn’t bet, which is probably just as it should be given it’s all our bleedin’ money anyway. She just loves horses, like all poshos.
And as for Corgis, without the positive PR generated by The Queen’s adoration of this oddest of breeds, the world may well be without these lovely stunted, stinking, mutant mutts.
Boozing
Talking of the racing, at Royal Ascot some years ago a case of gin that had been sent up to the Royal Box by the caterer was returned with a handwritten note by the Queen Mum stating, ‘It’s got to be Gordon’s’.
OK, so it’s not all a bed of nails.
Prince Charles
This wondrous loon sits in his greenhouse burbling on to his plants about homeopathy, buildings and biscuits, but whenever I hear about him pissing off successive governments, modern architects or climate change deniers, I can’t help feeling he must be doing something right.
He was famously a pioneer for organic produce, of course, though this is no doubt easier to achieve when you’ve been handed half of Cornwall, just for being you.
But telling your beau that you would like to be reincarnated as her tampon remains the sexiest thing a British man has ever said to a woman. Almost French.
Royal hotties
Finally, in times of war, colossal population displacement and the accompanying humanitarian crisis it’s such a relief to have the Duchess of Cambridge’s lovely hair and ‘tremendous frame’ or Prince Harry’s ‘rock hard abs’ to take our minds off it all. No amount of Syrian refugees is going to keep these royal hotties off the front pages of the greatest and worst press in the world.
So before we slice off their royal bonces and see what grows back, or take them out back to stand beside the trenches they’ve dug for themselves, let us remember the sheer entertainment value they provide. Sure, they’re not as consistent as Kyle or One Show, but when they’re good, they’re truly majestic.
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Image credits: Main image by Royal Navy Media Archive, balcony group shot by spacebahr, both used under this licence; Prince Andrew by Heiner Adams, used under this licence
