Royal Trix

I didn't watch a lot of the Jubilee - or "Platty Joobs", as it was apparently known by people who go on their "hollibobs". I had things to do. There's no double bank holiday for people don't have a proper job. I had fawning and scraping to do. 

But I saw bits and pieces. Boris Johnson being booed. The Queen joylessly talking about how heavy the crown is, and not in a metaphorical sense. Andrew's Covid-based convenient absenteeism. The BBC displaying the Irish flag to represent Northern Ireland. 

Oh dear. 

I live in Northern Ireland, and have done for a fifth of my life now. How can that possibly be true? But it is true and, while I'll always be a "blow in" and a "plastic Paddy" - thanks guys, living here has helped me view dear old Blighty from an arm's length. And madness has truly unfolded in the decade I've been away. It's practically unrecognisable, and yet perhaps truer to itself than its ever been. England used to see itself as a genteel ruling class, quietly and fairly improving the world, playing the game, respecting the ladies, and abiding by the rules. Decent, dogged, plucky. Not suave like a Frenchman, or loud like an American, but quiet, reserved, reliable and with a moral compass so powerful it could give you an MRI scan. Somehow, despite conquering half the globe, the British (meaning English, in this context) are always underdogs, and plucky ones. We are, on some level, John Mills, suffering bravely in black and white, and eventually winning out, with a kiss on the head of a small blonde child and a stiff, sexless hug for the lead actress. 

We are not like this, and we never have been. This is the fantasy of Britain. It's a Romantic dream-selfie. We are drunks. We are bigmouths. We are happily ignorant. Only the British could coin the phrase "too clever by half". We don't like show offs, people making out they're better than they are. We're not good at the sports we invented. We're not good at mixing. We're awkward and odd. We excel at hobbies and peculiar pastimes. We're funny, precisely because we're not friendly, we aren't comfortable, and we're repressed - we crack jokes because we can't talk about our feelings. This is why we're drunks and we fight a lot too. It's cold here and it rains a lot and, if we have a house, we like to stay in it. We fester and go peculiar. We used to deliver world class eccentrics for this reason. 

Reality television fundamentally changed the British people. Being a "character" in a performative sense became the ideal. Loud, muscled, hairless and empty-headed, a gilded bully, is the new gold standard: the Mark Wright stuff. Quite the opposite of what character used to mean. The internet has further democratised human discourse: influencers are largely the same the world over: the same faces, the same voices, the same teeth, the same showy editing. Positivity, so alien to Northern Europe, has been weaponised. Positivity that wants to sell you things, that wants to tell you that you're not enough, a Californian poison of self-actualisation.      

Remember how the whole world looked on in horror as America seemed to engulf itself during the Trump years, how every excess would provoke gasps of disbelief. I thought there might be a civil war. A mob stormed the White House! In a way that civil war is still playing out in pockets, with every school shooting, or assault on black church goers, that's where the poison and hatred is leaking out, and once again its not the powerful who are murdered, its the poorest, most disenfranchised in society. America likes to punch down.            

In Britain we have fewer guns and are closer together. We have less room to shout. And we have a Royal Family. The ultimate distraction: less the Illuminati than the Illuminations: gaudy, sea-side tat, rolled out to divert attention from the cost of living crisis, and the repulsive bonuses the energy companies are awarding themselves as their prices skyrocket. But its the Queen's 70th year on the throne, John. She's done great service to her country (it is her country - she owns most of it). The British people want pomp and circumstance, they want pageantry and a sense of continuity and history, they want flags and warm beer and trestle tables and queuing in the Mall, while an impossibly rich family wave at planes. Prince Louis, fresh from giving the young Mowgli a hard time, clamped his hands over his ears as the Red Arrows flew past, and is immediately a press darling. Is that all it takes? Is that all you want? I child reacting to noise? A mildy arresting image to put on the front page to justify all this stuff?    

Yeah. That's all they want. Vox pop interviews bear this out. The woozy Great British public appeared to be responding to some violent trauma, as though they'd just staggered away from a traffic accident. The testimony was vague and confusing. Asked why they were there, they'd blather something about "history" or the occasion being "iconic". There would be something about their parents, or they'd gesture at the crowd and say "this", as though being in a crowd with a thousand strangers was justification for sunstroke, as though waving a plastic flag on a stick, was saying something profound about what it meant to be British, and no further explanation was necessary or communicable. It was "if you know, you know" as mass hysteria. And I don't know. It's just one of those things that's not for me, like football, or talking about cars, or formal employment. I'm not invited to a lot of dinner parties.   

The foreign nationals interviewed, and there were a lot of them from colonies who'd eagerly traveled thousands of miles to be there, were in a different sort of dream state. They were savvy and media ready, talking in snappy one-liners and being fizzily upbeat. Poster people for Stockholm syndrome. If the British represented a time when ordinary people on TV, saw them shy and tongue-tied, as they grinned nervously under a tawny moustache in their best slacks on 321, the colonials were Insta-ready professionals, favouring the camera, and spitting out soundbites. They could probably have edited the footage better than the BBC too. It was a mystery. Did they mean this? Are Canadians, young Canadians, really that stoked about the Queen? They have red beer, Mooses and Naked News. What's the appeal of the nation's nonagenarian Nan? 

As usual, I feel as if I have a gene missing. I look on at popular delusions and the madness of crowds, all the things people really seem to enjoy: sport, religion, old wars, an elderly woman in a hat, and feel nothing. As though the bit of my brain that's supposed to flood me with dopamine every time I'm in a crowd with a lot of other shouting people, tells me instead I'd be having a better time at home listening to the CD, instead of smelling the vest-sweat of the six foot man standing in front of me.    

I should like this stuff. However you look at it this royal business is weird. A peculiar hangover from an imperial past, cobbled together from a thousand years of how the tricky business of monarchy is achieved. There's a bejeweled mirror-ball on top of the crown. At the coronation the queen was not only asked if she was an impostor, but they oiled her up from an ampule shaped like an eagle. This ceremony featured a 260 year old golden coach, drawn by horses, with a hologram of the 27 year old Queen projected on it. I can't even begin to strip away the semantic layers there. What does that say about Britain, and it's relationship with its titular owners? What do we want from the Royal Family? (I will never refer to them as The Firm). Commemorative plates? Laminated table cloths? Creaky skits with James Bond and Paddington Bear? Yes, apparently. That's what we need her to do.        

There's been a vote of no confidence in Boris Johnson. As I'm writing this Tories are voting. He'll survive, of course. Though I have no doubt this vote has been shunted into existence from the fact he was booed BY ROYALISTS entering the Coronation service. Booing the Prime Minister on the steps of  St Paul's. That's a bad look. There's no one to replace him - he has surrounded himself by idiots. No one will vote for Dominic Raab or Michael Gove. Imagine Priti Patel as Prime Minister, or M. C. Nadine Dorries. They got nothing going on. Even Rishi is poison now. If I thought Boris Johnson could think more than one meal ahead, I'd say he'd organised this to make himself untoppleable. But, despite looking like a human Weeble, if he wobbles he might well fall down. 

Like I say, we'll know in a few hours whether he's survived. I can't see him being ousted and, even if he is, the howling chaos of the past few years will continue. Whatever happens, you or I may go under. But the Royal family will always be fine. 

Northern Ireland isn't all that either: this week Orange Lodge members were filmed singing a jolly song about the murder of a young woman on her honeymoon, because her father was a Catholic Gaelic football manager. It also gave you an insight into what goes on in the orange halls - fat, bald men, drinking Carlsberg from the can. The tradition. The culture.