Scribblings Resurrection

Hitchins on the wedding

Friday, 29 April 2011

Royal Wedding avoidance

I’m sitting in the park with my laptop hooked up to the net through my phone, celebrating the Windsor-Middleton wedding by not celebrating it. I managed to find a pub with no TV1 to have breakfast and am now having coffee while watching the ducks. The streets may be almost empty but there are quite a few people in the park. Seems that not everyone is taken in by this expensive soap opera.

Royal Wedding avoidance

Christopher Hitchens’s take on the Windsor-Middleton wedding is quite up to his usual standard. I love his description of the ‘the vapid disco-princesses Diana and Sarah’ and Charles as ‘the morose, balding, New Age crank and licensed busybody that we flinch from today’. His description of the monarchy itself as ‘a hereditary disease that can only be cured by fresh outbreaks of itself’ is absolutely priceless. As for the Middletons — ‘the family had been overheard using lethally wrong expressions, such as serviette for napkin, settee for sofa, and — I can barely bring myself to type the shameful letters — toilet for lavatory’.

Magic stuff indeed! It’s almost worth having such a wedding so that you can criticise it. The ducks couldn’t give a damn either.


1 One of the bar staff told me the manager had taken off the power lead so that they couldn’t turn it on. Wonderous!

Posted 29 April 2011, 12:55 BST

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