Let them eat cake...

#13

It’s been difficult to avoid ‘The Wedding’ this week. Christ knows I’ve tried. I turned on the TV one evening without forethought and stumbled into a cookery programme. The first words I heard were, “… it’s the most important cake in a couple’s life.” And yes, they were talking about baking a wedding cake and yes, inevitably, they were impelled to bang-on about the royal wedding cake.

“Who,” I yelled as I grabbed for the TV remote, “measures their life-experiences in terms of cake?” Which is when it hit me – no, not the remote and not the cake – the anxiety. How had I missed out on all my cakes? What had happened to my learning-to-read cake, my first job cake, my first redundancy cake? Should there have been a ‘First affair with a married woman’ cake? I had to hold back the tears as I lamented all the milestones that had passed un- marked by cake. Where and when had my life and times in cake all gone so horribly wrong?

Naturally, I’d want to wish “Good Luck” and “Have a nice cake” to any couple going public on their life together. My interest in William and Catherine extends no further than this because I do not know them and they do not know me. And the fact of not knowing them is the main point. Time and again, over the last fifty years, the strategy adopted by the palace has been to present the Royal Family to us as if somehow we might all become acquainted. The monarchy has shifted from its historic stance of remoteness, authority and hauteur. Instead of the previous down-the-nose disregard, we now have a deliberate pretence of idealised familiarity. It’s not that they want to be like us. They believe that we should want to be like them. That way, their advisors have persuaded them, they will be more popular and thus more acceptable. The continuation of the monarchy will be assured because we commoners will have identified with The Royals on a very personal level. They have gritted their teeth and tolerated the use of Charlie instead of ‘HRH Prince Charles’, Lady Di instead of ‘Princess of Wales’, The Queen Mum, even Fergie – entirely demotic titles in place of the traditional aristocratic ones. And once we think we know them - so the argument goes – we will gladly accept the continuation of their actual status, their powers and their privileges. It has, however, been a very dangerous strategy and one which has backfired mightily down the years since first implemented in the run-up to Princess Margaret’s wedding in 1960.

From the outset, the strategy had two significant and interconnected flaws. One was the post-war exponential growth of the cult of celebrity, the other was the inherently pernicious nature of gossip. For any gossip to be interesting we have to know something of the people who are being gossiped about. In our fragmented world, ‘celebrities’ fulfil the role of being the someones that everyone feels they know. Aspects of their lives are taken into common-ownership. Their lives become sufficiently public, sufficiently invaded and sufficiently intruded upon for everyone to grasp the illusion of knowing them. They may be famous only for being famous, or for being fat, flatulent or fatuous, or good at football or for having unnervingly large breasts. Some celebrities manage to combine several of these attributes, no one has yet succeeded in possessing all of them – but they will, they will. When the ill-advised royals drifted into this torrid world they lost control of what was known about them and all their doings became, by turns, sentimentalised, hounded, disparaged and casually trashed for the titillation of the common people and the financial benefit of tabloid newspapers. Looking back, it now seems to have been inevitable that the words Elton John sang at Princess Diana’s funeral should have been inspired by a song originally written as a tribute to Marilyn Monroe.

Like I said, I don’t know William Wales and Catherine Middleton and I have no interest in pretending that I do. I don’t wish to intrude on their private lives in any way and I’m happy to continue my one-person boycott of any newspaper that does. The Royals have human rights too and I am happy to respect their right to enjoy a private and a family life. It’s a week or three early for Whitsun but my interest in their wedding extends no farther than did Larkin’s in the dozen marriages he witnessed getting under way one hot Saturday afternoon:

…………………………………..Struck, I leant

                                More promptly out next time, more curiously,

                                And saw it all again in different terms:……….

                                The last confetti and advice were thrown,

                                And, as we moved, each face seemed to define

                                Just what it saw departing: children frowned

                                At something dull; Fathers had never known

                                Success so huge and wholly farcical;

                                     The women shared

                                The secret like a happy funeral;         

                                While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared

                                At a religious wounding…………………………[1]

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[1] Philip Larkin, lines taken from The Whitsun Weddings (1964)

Next week: say “Cheese……cake!”

An Accident of History

#12

The papers last weekend were running stories speculating on possible changes to the Act of Settlement, removing the primacy given to male children. Changes to this Act (dating from 1701) would be of limited, possibly only esoteric, interest were it not for the impending marriage of William Wales to Catherine Middleton. If the first child born to their marriage is a girl, her claim to the throne would be overtaken by any subsequent younger brother. The Act would have to be amended (not just here but in all Commonwealth countries) if we – or rather ‘They’ – decided to modernise the order of succession to follow strict primogeniture regardless of gender.

Well, hurrah for that, or them, you might say – always assuming you give a monkey’s … which hopefully you don’t, except out of a purely whimsical interest in the quirkiness of history. And while they’re about it, they could also remove the religious test – designed to prevent a Catholic succeeding to the throne or any prospective heir from marrying one. And it’s not just Catholics; anyone not in communion with the Anglican church is barred. That, I guess, takes care of everyone who wouldn’t write “C of E” on their paperwork at Accident & Emergency. Removing the ban on Catholics would probably also require dis-establishment of the Church of England and I struggle to remember any reasons why either you or I should be troubled by that.

Hereditary monarchy is a strange anachronism. Its main function these days seems to be to set the Gold Standard for ‘A’ list celebrity status, with all the consequent fawning and trashing and keyhole-peeping that being a ‘celeb’ entails. The hereditary principle simply does not work as a mechanism for finding the right person for the job. No one would want to consult a medical doctor who had done nothing more than inherit the title of ‘doctor’. Yet that’s exactly how we choose our Head of State. The Act of Settlement is a tacit admission that the hereditary principle is flawed but instead of dispensing with the whole idea, our ancestors tried to manipulate the details to ensure a more congenial outcome.

Under the Act, succession to the British throne is restricted to the heirs of the Electress Sophia of Hanover (1630 – 1714) as determined by male-preference primogeniture, religion and legitimate birth. It’s particularly strange that males are given precedence in the royal succession considering our long history of spectacularly ineffectual males on, behind and around the throne. Were it not for inheritance through the female line, the House of Windsor would never have become ensconced in its various castles and palaces in the first place. Nor indeed would any of the previous ruling houses of Tudor, Stuart, Hanover and Saxe-Coburg & Gotha.

No one would accuse Edward III (King from 1327 to 1377) of being an ‘ineffectual male’. On the contrary, this grisly old goat went rather too far in the opposite direction. He and his Queen (Phillippa of Hainault, if you insist,) upset the medieval applecart by producing several too many sons and thus giving rise to the Wars of the Roses. One hundred years later, in 1485, Henry Tudor (claiming the Lancastrian line via his mother, Margaret Beaufort) put an end to both Richard III (of York) and said Wars at the battle of Bosworth Field. An astute and meticulous man, Henry VII quickly married the late Richard’s niece, Elizabeth of York, thereby re-uniting the Houses of York and Lancaster. He was careful to maintain, however, that his claim to the throne was valid, independent of the marriage. Showing considerable prescience, he subsequently arranged for his daughter, Margaret, to marry James IV, King of Scotland. It was because of this alliance that a century later, when Queen Elizabeth I died childless in 1603, Margaret Tudor’s great-grandson, James Stuart (James VI of Scotland) – gaily headed south to become James I of England.

James was the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, by Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. Mary was executed by her cousin Elizabeth I and Darnley was murdered. As dysfunctional families go, the Tudors and Stuarts take some beating. But, lack of a happy home not withstanding, James was also the James of the King James Bible – so well done him! James married off his own daughter Elizabeth to Frederick V, the Elector Palantine – which would lead eventually to Sophia, of whom more later. James Stuart was also the father of Charles I who rather over-did ‘The Divine Right of Kings’ and got himself beheaded by parliament in 1649. The Cromwellian ‘Protectorate’ did not long survive Oliver’s death in 1658 and in 1660 the Stuart monarchy was restored in the person of Charles II. This next Charles presided over the Great Plague and the Great Fire but produced no legitimate heir. When he died in 1685 he was succeeded (briefly) by his younger brother, James – numerically James II. Alert to James’ Catholic leanings, and fearing the establishment of a Catholic dynasty when James managed to father a legitimate son, the English rallied to James’ daughter Mary and her robustly Protestant husband, William of Orange. In 1688, in a series of events rather inaccurately known to history as ‘the Glorious Revolution’, William landed at Torbay in Devon and James II fled abroad. He and later his son (The Old Pretender) and grandson, Bonnie Prince Charlie, (The Young etc. ) maintained a claim to the throne until 1788, although the last meaningful Jacobite rebellion had ended in blood and gore at Culloden in 1746.

William’s claim to the throne came through two women; his mother, Charles I’s daughter Mary and his wife, also (and rather unimaginatively) named Mary. William III, still to this day variously revered and reviled by sectarians in Ireland as King Billy, reigned jointly with his wife (who was also, obviously, his first cousin) until Mary’s death in1694. William continued as king until he too died (as a result of falling off his horse) in 1702; whereupon Mary Stuart’s sister Anne became queen. Queen Anne gave birth to fourteen children, none of whom survived into adulthood. She also suffered at least four miscarriages and died (of exhaustion and broken heart, I should imagine) in 1714 at the age of 49.

We now revert, as did the authors of the Act of Settlement, to James I’s decision to arrange for his daughter Elizabeth to marry the Elector Frederick. Elizabeth’s daughter Sophia was duly married to the Elector of Hanover. Thus when the unfortunate Queen Anne died the succession passed to the House of Hanover in the non-English-speaking person of Sophia’s son, George I. Georges II and III naturally followed with a little local ‘madness’ and a period of Regency along the way. George IV had issues but died without issue and was succeeded by his brother, William IV. On William’s demise in 1837, the crown passed to his young niece, Victoria. She promptly threw herself upon her cousin the diligent and devoted Albert of Saxe Coburg and Gotha with whom she had innumerable children. The Royal family were then stuck with Albert’s resoundingly Germanic surname until 1917 when – at the height of the First World War – Victoria’s grandson, George V, poked his cousin (Kaiser Bill) in the eye by dumping the family name and re-inventing the British branch of the family firm as The House of Windsor. So there! And after all that quite how they justify the precedence given to male heirs is a right royal mystery to me. It is almost as big a mystery as why we, The People, still tolerate the power, wealth and privilege enjoyed by the slow-motion historical accident that is our beloved Royal Family.

Next week: Banged-Up in the Tower.

"Where to guv'nor?"

#11

Received a letter this week from Ed. Yes, that Ed - Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour Party. It was a personal letter, well at least a letter addressed to me in person – if that counts as the same thing. I would have been impressed had I not guessed that Ed has a computer-programme to do all the addressing and mailing for him. He just gets some eager, young, intern to input the electoral roll into one end of the Party’s PC and out the other come a zillion letters all individually addressed to everyone named on the register. So, maybe we’ve all had one of Ed’s letters informing us that Ed wants to know what we think? Blimey! But hang about - shouldn’t that be the other way round? Shouldn’t it be us wanting to know what Ed thinks?

And he must think something, surely? His mind can’t be a blank sheet waiting to be written all over, can it? Only last summer he fought a long campaign to win the leadership of the Party and I bet they were rather hoping he already had a few ideas of his own. Or can it be that Ed’s ‘Big Idea’ was simply this: “Elect me as leader and I’ll drop Dave a line; see what Dave thinks we should do….”? Well that’s all very flattering – or rather it would be if I could believe a word of it. But look again at his letter…

“Dear Dave,

What are your priorities to move Britain forward?…Your ideas are invaluable – thank you for your time and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Yours sincerely,

Ed.”

Well, he’s clearly asking for it, no mistake. So here goes; a reply straight from the Bus Lane:-

Dear Ed,

Thanks for yours of the ult. inst. I see you are having a policy review. This implies you do actually already have some policies. I mean, logically you must have, otherwise what’s to review? So what are your policies, Ed? Are they anything like the speech bubbles on the back of your letter? “Protecting jobs during the recession…More support for parents bringing up kids.” Sorry Ed, I don’t want to nit-pick but these are mere sentiments; they don’t actually qualify as ‘policies’. To count as policies, you’d have to say how you are going to protect jobs and what support you want to make available to which parents and for doing what. Can you do that? Apparently not, judging by the evidence available to date.

Evidently you want us to look favourably on you as a listening, caring, in-touch kind of guy - just like Cameron and Cleggy do. What actually comes across is that you are a skilled, professional, politician. Politics is what you are good at; it’s what you do. It’s probably all you have ever done. Reading your letter, I worry that you see yourself as something akin to a political taxi-driver. Since University, you’ve been busy doing the Westminster equivalent of ‘The Knowledge’. It’s as if we are all invited to hail Ed’s taxi-cab and be taken wherever we want to go. Or will it become a case of “Trust Honest Ed”? He’s the boy who knows all the highways and byways - and by now, no doubt, some of the back-doubles too.

Sorry Ed, but I don’t want a ride in a taxi. I want to travel on a bus because a bus tells me where it’s going before we start. I want the route number and the destination displayed up there on the front, in black and white, for all to see. And if I can work out which bus-stop I’m waiting at, then I’ll also know how far your bus has to go before it reaches its destination. I want to be able to anticipate the places we’ll pass through on our journey. I want to be able to hazard a guess at how long it might take for us to get there from here.

That’s the way our party-based democracy works, Ed. You build and paint your bus and tell us where you want to go and how you plan to get there. We decide if we want to take a ride on your bus or someone else’s. So please don’t pretend you’re a cab, available by negotiation for private hire. You owe it to us to have sorted out where you wanted to go and how you reckon to get there before you ran for the leadership, not afterwards. If you don’t know those things, why are you in politics? If you find you’re more interested in the process of politics and less concerned with the destination, then you’re not my kind of politician. I don’t want to take a taxi, no matter how astute the driver or how much he enjoys the business of driving. I want a bus and preferably a big red one. Please tell me what you think the Labour Party is about. I need to know if you’re really as clueless as your letter implies.

Yours sincerely,

Dave.

Next week: Royal Flush: Down the tubes with the House of Windsor.

Shoe-Gazing through these new bi-focals

#10

   Our children re-connect us differently to the world. I didn’t know, for instance, that ‘shoe-gazing’ was a category of music until Conrad, younger of our two sons, explained – a little impatiently I thought - that it describes a prolonged guitar solo. The soloist stares downward – presumably deep in concentration – his gaze appearing to be focused on his shoes. I enjoy finding terms like that; words or phrases that concisely define or describe an activity. As labels go, ‘Shoe-gazing’ is at least as accurate as ‘Cubism’ ever was, or indeed ‘Impressionism’. Most of our many ‘isms’ were originally intended as critical dismissals – insults even. In time, these become adopted – sometimes gladly – by those at whom they were previously thrown. Take the label ‘Stuckists’[1] which was at first applied dismissively to a group of figurative painters. Tracey Emin is credited with screeching at them, “Your paintings are stuck, you are stuck! Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!” And the epithet, as it were, ‘stuck’. And, of course, Tracey should know. She boasts of having a First Class degree in Fine Art and someone’s published a book showing 1000 of her totally dreadful drawings. So, good for her and yah boo sucks (or should that be ‘Stucks’?) to the rest.

   But hey, calm down dear, music hath charms so strum on. On Thursday evening, Charlie (older son) was listening (via t’Internet) to a band from New Jersey called The Gaslight Anthem. I was puzzled – not an unusual occurrence - assuming that would be the name of a song. I mean, ‘Anthem’? That’s a clue, surely? But no; that is the name of the band and very ‘Jersey’ they are too. They sing about disappointment in its many forms; especially where urban wastelands, highways and cars are involved. All very Bruce Springsteen, appropriately enough considering. Like they say, “New Jersey? Good place to be from.”

   The Gaslight song involved some particularly fraught encounter in, or on, the backseat of a burned-out car. (It’ll be called ‘Backseat’ if you want to pursue your interest further). The next song he selected was ‘Old White Lincoln’. Again it involved a car, not the assassinated Civil War President who was, indeed, old, white and Lincoln. The lyric offered homage, of a kind, to one of those vastly indulgent cars that lurched along America’s streets and highways from the late ‘50s onwards. I’m still a sucker for the insistent beat and celebratory lyrics you get with pop songs about cars and driving down endless highways. For me, Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Cadillac Ranch’ is the unsurpassed classic of the genre. Okay, I know we should feel guilty about all that gas being guzzled and all those resources wasted, blah, blah, de blah. But the warm glow is still there, only now it’s illicit. Is it being so incorrect that  helps keep it warm? And it’s another reminder of being ‘stuck’, albeit where we are now stuck is the Bus Lane.

   But, if you are not aware of being ‘stuck’ are you therefore necessarily, ‘un-stuck’? And, what does it mean to be ‘un-stuck’? Could things be about to go wrong, as in, “to come unstuck”? I certainly hope not because Conrad (yes, him again) is very much a not-stuck type of person and, incidentally, a promising not-stuck painter in oils too. This week he and his band - BLACK MANILA - have launched their first record. Yes, it’s one of those proper old-style recordings on vinyl! I’ve got a copy, right here on the desk next to me; can’t play it of course because we no longer have a turntable. There’s progress for you. The two songs on the disc are Reno Rush and Happiness. Of Reno Rush I know nothing but I am confident that ‘Happiness’ will not be any sort of homage to Ken Dodd. Nor do I expect it to revisit that scene in ‘There’s a Girl in My Soup’[2] where Goldie Hawn and Peter Sellers arrive at a hotel in the South of France. The porter, assuming them to be honeymooners, shows them to their suite and bows out saying, in his best, most carefully rehearsed, English, “May you ‘ave ‘ap-penis orl your alife.”

   Check out these latest sounds (as they say) on t’Internet, pop-pickers. Try the band’s own location http://blackmanila.bandcamp.com/ . Archivists may wish to know that ‘Black Manila’ were formerly ‘Black Manila Beach Parade’ and before that ‘WolfGangInBerlin’. The ‘InBerlin’ suffix being added, I presume, to avoid any confusion with the late Wolfgang Amadeus etc. Oh, and before that even they were 'Stazi-Static', I kid you not. I cannot fathom the origins of Black Manila as a name or, more recently, how the ‘Beach Parade’ came to be dropped. The word ‘Manila’ always makes me think first of envelopes and then of a 1950’s comic telling the adventures of a team of US Navy frogmen based in Manila, capital of the Philippines. Manila Menfish the heroes were called. Anyone out there still remember them? 

   Some weeks ago I tried hinting to Conrad that Menfish sounded like a great name for a band. I was rightly ignored. I mean, what the hell do I know about stuff? “And don’t go challenging Darwinism with your counter-evolutionary daydreams, Dad. Get back on the bus. You’ll be wanting us to listen to Neil Young next!”

Ah Neil, now you're talking; the master shoe-gazer par excellence...

Next week: Falling down stairs – it’s a bi-focal thing.

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[1] The Stuckists Manifesto, 1999. “…Art that has to be in a gallery to be art isn’t art…painting pictures is what matters…” Try www.stuckism.com

[2] ‘There’s a Girl in my Soup.’ Roy Boulting. 1970