23.7.13 Oh Boy

"The braying sheep on my TV screen make this boy shout, make this boy scream."

Thank you very much Mr Weller, very succinctly summed up.

(Going Underground if you didn't know)

Lets be clear, I'm not a monarchist by any stretch of the imagination. My stance has, however, softened since my vitriolic anti Royalty views of the mid 80s; in those days I fully agreed with Paul Heaton's opinion that all their heads should be on spikes outside  Buck House. Nowadays I couldn't really give a toss.

A Republic would be nice in theory but I'm sure that the British public remains stupid enough to elect knobheads like Cameron and Clegg as joint president,  giving them even more of an illusion of their own adequacy than they have now so, a King? Yeah what the hell.

And if we're going to have a King then William seems a decent enough choice; he seems like a nice enough bloke.

And this is the crux; I've got nothing against William and Kate, they seem like a nice couple. They seem to be genuinely in love with each other, any interviews with the two show an ease between them.

And now they're parents. Watch them leave hospital with their one day old son (you can probably find it somewhere on the telly) -why would you feel anything against them? They're happy. Dislike the strata of society that one of them represents by all means but as people neither have done anything to harm us.

I have nothing against William and Kate, my problem is the media coverage; two days of having a news event that wasn't actually a news event being forced down my throat every time I turned on the TV or the radio. Two days of a camera set on a pair of closed doors. Two days of reporters interviewing other reporters each speculating as to when the birth would take place, whether the child would be a boy or a girl, what the latter would mean to the constitution if it came to pass and after the birth of a son changing the question to 'what would have happened if the child had been a girl. Jesus Christ, are you actually listening to yourselves?

Then being endlessly told that William had been there throughout the birth; was anybody under the impression that he wouldn't be? It's the 21st Century, he's not his Dad. Being told that he's changed a nappy already. See my previous comment. Although, in fairness, fair do's lad, that first nappy is a bloody nightmare.

Then they were out, in public, with the baby, looking all casual and happy. Then they were gone and the media started interviewing itself again. "Why" Sky's reporter apparently asked "has Kate still got a bump?" demonstrating an incredible grasp of the complexities of biology before falling back into interviewing a photographer who could show us the photographs that he had taken of the scenes that had unfolded before us totally forgetting that they had invented a rewind button for the telly so that we could see them all again ourselves.

I'm not going to complain about the crowds gathering to cheer and wave flags and sing Happy Birthday to the baby (although surely this is a first? I don't recall any choruses of Happy Birthday being sung in the direction of my kids on the day they were born, I'm sure it's more traditional to wait  until their first birthday) I find their behaviour a bit sad and somewhat bizarre but they would probably say the same thing about buying comics and owning so many bloody CDs. They're harming nobody, they're happy, leave them to it. Each to their own.

Which is exactly what the media appear to have missed; there's been no 'each to their own' in their approach, we have all been informed that we are happy, we are celebrating. Even if we're not really that bothered.

So to recap:

Two extremely rich but quite possibly still nice people had a baby. One day, probably long after my death, that baby will be king. They seem happy. They've gone home. They'll tell us his name when they're good and ready.

Can we move on now?