Junk the Jubilee - If our monarch has become a fashion icon, heaven help us. I try to see myself in a pastel-coloured dress with matching coat, and feel ever so sick
Monday: these are amusing, if irritating, times for republicans. I watch the frantic preparations for the spontaneous outpouring of love, loyalty and sickening sentimentality that is planned to swamp us all in the coming few days and am reminded of swans. All that surface slickness and underneath, out of sight, scaly little feet and legs going like the clappers.
I sense lots of official anxiety to do things right and great waves of apathy from the citizenry. Whoops! I mean, of course, the subjects of the monarch. I've done a bit of interviewing among neighbours, friends and Waitrose check-out queues, and it seems that the two-day bank holiday will be an orgy of horticulture, with garden centres making more cash than compost, and a flurry of family party visits to Woburn and Legoland. Nothing new there, then.
But businesses are trying their best to make money out of the occasion. I have received several waste-paper basketfuls of jubilee invitations ranging from a delicatessen offering "Jubilation" sandwiches, half as big again as American ones (there's no better way to celebrate the existence of an old queen, I suppose, than copying the nation who got rid of her old great-great-plus grandfather), to a Large Size Dress Shop assuring me that the jubilee means ladies like me with spreading hips are at last in fashion.
That one really got to me. If our reigning monarch has now become a fashion icon, heaven help us all. I keep trying to see myself in a pastel-coloured dress with matching coat and off-the-face hat, and all I feel is ever so sick.
Tuesday It takes a lot of skill to ruin your own funeral, but that is precisely what old Elizabeth managed to do. She lay in state being visited by loyal tourists pretending to be loyal subjects, who signed up and thereby made Palace people believe the real loyal subjects were playing the game their way, when they were actually watching the proceedings on the telly.
She managed to outlive her younger daughter, whose lifestyle killed her prematurely. This gave the old woman added pathos - to see one's own child die is indeed the most cruel of fates, even for a rich queen.
She timed her death magnificently (much as her despised granddaughter-in-law had done before her); by dying on Saturday night in time for the Sunday papers, she made sure the event got even more coverage.
And now? The howl of fury that has gone up over her secret £50m tax-free legacy to her offspring is ear-splitting. Even the Daily Mail, with its masthead forelock for easy pulling in the presence of royals, disapproves and is bitching away about the iniquitous tax system that made it possible.
But the royal tax story is disgraceful - why should we, the taxpayers, be expected to pay millions for doing up Clarence House to make it fit for the old woman's grandson to live in?
Wednesday I am sucked into the fuss by an unrefusable invitation to spend a few hours on a bus with BBC TV London, racketing around town to discuss 50 years of the capital's politics with, inter alia, the rightwing journalist Ann Leslie. (I find it amazing that it is possible to like a person, every one of whose political opinions you despise. But Ann and I manage to be good friends. Go figure.)
The bus is painted a sickly yellow that is intended to look gold (it wishes!). We have a classic London bus experience when it refuses to start and, it seems, the programme will have to be done on the curb. But Kevin, an old-school bus man down to his roll-up cigarettes, manages to get the groaning wheezer to lurch its way round and round Trafalgar Square, which is full of people in green boots and Barbours because today umpteen horses, dogs and country people (and yes, I can tell 'em apart, even though I'm a Cockney born and bred) have come to lobby parliament on a cruelty to animals issue. Isn't that nice of them?
So we gossip and reminisce for what seems ages, but at last I manage to get in my anti-monarchist views. Whether they will remain in the final cut of the programme is anyone's guess. I suspect not, on account of all the previous times such opinions have been left on the cutting-room floor. I know the line down there very well indeed. Dammit.
Thursday My republicanism, I swear, is rooted in political thought, fed as I was from earliest schooldays on a diet of John Stuart Mill, Tom Paine, Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and similar, highly seditious material; but there are times when the desire to rant at one of the family inhabiting the monarchy is irresistible.
HRH Charlie, aka Our Glorious Hope for the Future, Gulp, Gulp, has built a garden for the Chelsea Flower Show, for which he has been jeered and awarded an insultingly low grade.
But what does the poor sap expect? Not only does he drivel on and on about homoeopathic uses of herbal remedies, dredging his opinions (which he then labels as facts) from the depths of his huge medical ignorance, but he uses his much-acclaimed understanding of modern architecture to adorn same garden with a wattle and daub hut.
I tell you: with royals like him, who needs republicans?
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