A Big, Fat Royal Wedding

We need some Royal news, something big to catch up with the monarchies abroad which are procreating and abdicating at reckless speed. 

How about another wedding?  You remember the last one.  The UK was a better place.  Weeks before the ceremony, the TV showed happy children lining the streets of London, waving little Union Jacks as if the wedding was already here.  Where did those pictures come from?  The children weren’t waiting for Wills and Kate.  Not that far ahead.  I hope not, anyway.  They were waving their little flags at something else.  Whatever it was, some file pictures had been cleverly employed.  It looked like a Royal Wedding.  Perhaps it was.  There has been more than one.  The BBC was misleading us again, but for once it didn’t matter.

Adults were also happy just looking at the range of children, black, white and brown.  Liberals enjoyed the ethnic mix; conservatives, the buzz of Empire.  On the real day, in the Abbey, the camera kept returning to a group of choir boys, a black one, a yellow one and a white one with glasses.  Are you wondering what will happen when their voices break?  You didn't see the men in the stall behind them, white cheeks wedged in like a row of perfect dentures. 

The roads along the route were cleaned up, too, but the wedding wasn’t good for everyone.  Anarchists were arrested and banned from central London.  They had once made jokes about Diana’s death, so it probably served them right.  But what about the squatters, living inoffensively in grand, old buildings, vast and vacant as cathedrals?  They were evicted in a single heap – emptiness is next to godliness – while the libertarians who normally defend them were distracted by the pomp.

Less enchanting than Diana’s, the wedding just reminded us of her.  In the papers, people said the bridesmaid was prettier than the bride.  They weren’t arrested.  We followed the procession on the BBC.  The commentary was so sombre it felt like burying royalty, not marrying it.  People complained.  They weren’t thrown out of London.  They watched the “Big, Fat Gypsy Wedding” on Channel 4 instead.  Channel 4 is very helpful.  It does the same at Xmas.  We get the Alternative Queen’s Message, one year a transvestite from Tooting.  

Another Giant FA Cup

May is a month that shows the importance of winning – exams, football finals and the like. The FA Cup is a favourite of mine, mainly because of its name.  I prefer it with two syllables – FA Cup – although it should be three.

When teachers here mention sport, they talk about the teamwork side of it, not the trophies.  I guess they know that most people are losers, and that children might become dissatisfied, then anti-social, if winning was more important to them than taking part.  Perhaps some teachers really believe what they say.  Perhaps they’re just losers. 

In a primary school assembly last month, the children watched a cartoon entitled Teamwork. They enjoyed it, as children tend to do.  I’m not sure they got the message, though.  I’m not sure I did. 

A dozen little birds were sitting on a wire, feather to feather, looking quite pleased with themselves, as little birds tend to do.  They were all identical.  A much bigger bird flew down and pushed his way into the middle.  He was a different colour and very clumsy.  The wire sagged because of his weight.  The little birds got sick of it.  They started pecking at the big bird’s claws, one by one. This seemed to hurt as he took each claw off the wire as it was pecked.  In the meantime, the wire kept sagging lower and lower.  The big bird now hung upside-down.  He almost touched the ground. Just one big claw was clinging to the wire.  The little birds could see that they were nearly done, so they pecked even harder.  Then two of them raised their beaks and looked at each other.  It was too late. The big bird eased himself onto the ground and removed the final claw, releasing the wire like a giant bowstring.  The little birds shot up into the air so fast that their feathers came off.  A moment later, they plopped back to earth through a cloud of floating feathers.  The big bird sat and watched.  When the little birds realised they were naked, they ran off to hide.

The teacher who was taking the assembly asked the children to comment on what they had seen.  They all said the right thing.  Someone pointed out that it was dangerous to sit on a wire.  The teacher agreed.  An older child said that the little birds were punished for discriminating against the big one because he looked different.  The teacher agreed again.  No one said that the little birds’ teamwork backfired, that revenge feels good, or that bullies win.  

Bi guy, 62, very open-minded dog

I saw this dating ad on TV and I thought, how nice, a fellow creature who won’t look down on you.  Pets can be picky, but one dog at least won’t snarl.  Then I was disappointed.  On the next line, the word lover was waiting to pounce.  The bi guy, 62, was an open-minded dog lover. 

It was meant to be reassuring.  You can trust someone who keeps a pet.  Daters, like everybody else, are looking for people they can trust.  They often specify genuine.  I’ve even seen Status no problem, just be genuine.  It doesn’t matter if your intended mate is married, as long as you can trust them.  But however genuine another man’s wife turns out to be with you, she is not being very genuine with him.

Lover and love are two words that don’t often appear on dating sites, unless they relate to a pet.  You don’t want to put people off, especially if you’re looking for love.  Of course, it’s usually more to do with fun.  It’s also pretty mercenary.  I like Must have own house and car.  It does make physical meetings easier, so it’s partly practical, but whoever posts this could sound like a money-grubber.  To tell the truth, on-line daters count pennies as much as penises.  They don’t write own house and car.  They put ohac instead.  And gen, not genuine.  No tws = don’t reply if you don’t want sex.  They abbreviate to save the credits on their account.   Think about it, though.  If you have your ohac and want to impress an f, m, cd, xd, tv, tg or ts, too many abbreviations might just look stingy. 

There must be people out there who are looking for love.  OK, it was just a thought. But there are people, apparently, who believe in ‘forever.’  What else can ltr mbm mean?  I saw this the other day.  Usually, the ad will run: text chat mbm (maybe more).  That’s where the ohac come in.  But what more is there after an ltr (long-term relationship)?  Marriage?  Exchanging smutty videos till we die?  One day, hopefully quite soon, I will stop having thoughts.

Before I leave you – no, I’m not dumping you today, or dying – a final word on pets.  There are people who let their dog, or hamster, watch them make love.  Watch, not join in.  Perhaps some people insist.  Sit!  I expect a dog would show more interest than a hamster.  A pet could also help if things went wrong.   I read in the news that a couple got stuck during sex.  

Offending your fan base

Offending your fan base presupposes fans.  Once you’ve got them, don’t let them go.

In Adelaide, there was a well-known journalist on a leading daily paper. This is a long time ago.  He had his own column where he commented on all sorts of things.  He could do what he liked.  He’d been popular for decades, especially with middle-aged women.  To tell the truth, what he wrote seemed pretty bland to me.  Maybe that was why he was popular.   

His admirers tended to be the old girls along the foothills, where the polite people lived.  In their letters to the paper, they regularly agreed that he wrote beautiful prose.  Whether he did or not is beside the point.  They said he did.  Most of what he wrote had some resonance with the older generation.  This was natural.  He was getting on himself.  He wasn’t just courting the older reader.  He wasn’t 19, flirting with Aunt. 

Still, I’m not sure why the old girls liked him so much.  Perhaps he reassured them.  They thought someone understood them.  Perhaps they just liked him because everyone else did.  He was very easy to read.  Anyway, his articles were the main reason they opened their newspaper in the morning.

For me, the most interesting thing about him was the manner in which he folded.  It was a kind of literary suicide, if not a conscious one.  He may have been complacent.  He didn’t see it coming. 

The old girls of Adelaide were picking up their paper, as they usually did, from the driveway or the garden, where the lad had thrown it; they were looking at the headlines, as they usually did, before turning to their favourite column.  What was it about today?  The shape of women’s bodies.  

He hadn’t done that before.  Something didn’t feel right.  Again, it all seemed pretty bland to me.  He had just set down, in his beautiful prose, the opinion that women of a certain age should not wear jeans, in particular the tight sort that teenagers wear.  They should show a bit of leg.  The naked leg, or even one in stockings, was better for an older woman.  He himself preferred the actual leg.

We will never know what triggered that article.  He probably saw an old girl in tight jeans on the bus into town or just popping around to the shops, and then wished he hadn’t.  We’ve all done that.  It’s not something you would imagine, is it, like a poet?  His mistake was to put his thoughts down in print.  He never said that middle-aged women have lumpy bodies.  He didn’t need to.  And now ladies knew that he looked at their legs.  He was suddenly a kind of pervert or at least someone who had grown a bit senile, a writer who had gone on writing too long.  None of his old fans were flattered that he noticed what they wore, at least not the ones who wrote in to complain.  No one defended him.

He retired, or the paper pushed him.

Punctuated by a schoolboy

I thought I should run a check on my internet profile, so I did a Google search.  A split second later, there I was. 

‘My cat tends to jump on and torture an older male cat we own. She’s spaid and about 8 months and the male cat hates her?’ 

The male would be a sci-fi fan.  I like the question mark.

Life is a litter of mysteries.  Do things just because you can.  You might want to cause pain.  You might do it without meaning to.  I work as an English tutor.  One of my teenage pupils told me that he’d neutered a male cat while on work experience at a vet’s. Being a boy, he was used to making errors.  Spelling, punctuation, that sort of thing.  But the neutering was no mistake.  He was told to do it by the vet.   For once, he put a glinting full stop in the right place.  His mistake, the vet said, was to cut too deep. 

Candidates on work experience make all sorts of blunders.  Like ordinary employees, they are unable to do lots of things which they have been told to do.  They arrive late for work, they put too much sugar in the boss’s tea, they over-darken the photocopies.  They cut too far into the kitten’s flesh.  On work experience, of course, you can get it wrong and no one really minds because no one is paying you.  The vet even said it wasn’t a bad job.  I wonder, do schools send pupils out to hospitals and airlines? 

Most children wouldn’t dare disobey instructions from their employer during work experience.  They want a good report.  But it wouldn’t occur to them in the first place that they might be asked to do something which was wrong.  My pupil hadn't realised.  He'd actually felt quite pleased with himself.

          When he told me about his improvised snip, I ad-libbed a short piece of my own, something about empathy – with the owner of the cat, not the cat itself.  I asked the young man if he’d want his pet cat neutered by a schoolboy.  He said no straightaway.

Sorry

When I walked past Keith’s window last Thursday, just after sunset, he wasn’t doing what he usually did. 

At that time of day, the light on the road was darker than the light inside his room, so anyone passing, and bothering to look in, could see what Keith was up to.  He never closed the heavy curtain till well after sunset.  His thinner, net curtain you could see through quite easily.  Yellow with tobacco smoke and age, it was there, where it always was, behind the glass.  It looked untouched.  I’ve never seen it move.  It’s like the painted scenery on a stage.   

Keith seemed different, though.  He wasn’t sitting with his face towards the window, eyes on the laptop, his features lit strangely by the light from the screen.  He wasn’t standing with his profile to the road, going over something in his mind.  He wasn’t in his kitchen space, touching the toaster.   He was slumped in his chair.  I thought he might be sleeping.  But it didn’t look like sleep. 

The door to our building was wide open.  It happens now and then.  I walked in.  Keith’s door, the first on the left, was open too.  A policeman was just inside, writing notes on a pad.  He was standing by the toaster, with his profile to the door, and I knew that Keith was dead. 

I turned away.  Another man appeared and said sorry – just that word – mouthed it more than spoke.  He was embarrassed.  For the next two days, he came and went, emptying Keith’s room out, bit by bit, onto the back seat of a car.  A woman helped.  I’ve lived nine years at this address.  When Keith was alive, I didn’t see them once.

He used to trim the bushes, and tidy the garden at the front.  On one tree, which he pruned a few weeks ago, spring growth is tugging at the edges, swelling neatly, like bacteria on a slide.

Wood v Dunsinane

Thunder. Enter the three Witches.

Sir Alex Ferguson, Sean Connery, Andy Murray.  They’re in the news together.  Weird Sisters – the football coach, the cinema spy and the street-wise version of little Tim Henman – but all successful Scots, for whom being Scottish is the ingredient of success.

With an eye toward the vote on Scottish independence, the two old grandees have been following Murray around the tennis circuit in order to promote brand Scotland.  Young, energetic, victorious, he’s a model for the nation’s youth.  The face of the new Scotland.

So, what’s in the pot?

The language – not Lowland Scots or Gaelic.  Just Murray's foul mouth when he’s losing. Turning the air blue.  Since 2008, the tabloids have punned on his colourful language and the colour of his national flag.  The face of the new Scotland, or at least the mouth.  “I wasn’t praying,” he said after a match.  Christians, cover your ears.  Tartar's lips are in the pot.

The pound – the Scots can’t keep it.  The leaders of the main Westminster parties say so.  You can’t have your pound cake and eat it, too.   It’s independence, warts and all.

The EU – the Scots can’t join it.  The President of the European Commission, Senhor José Manuel Durão Barroso, says so.  He thinks that Spain would block the admission of an independent Scotland as a warning to its own Basque separatists.  If he’s right, if the Scots vote Oui, and the Spaniards vote Naw, there’ll be more tongue of dog in the pot.

Prier pour l’Écosse.  What about some toe of frog?  Damn it, throw the whole leg in, sautéed with garlic.  Then snails in wine, more garlic: Escargots à la Bruxelles.  Be careful not to break the shells.  You can have them for currency when the odour’s gone.