“The society which has abolished every kind of adventure makes its own abolition the only possible adventure.” Paris, May 1968


Tuesday 19 April 2011

Will my last scraps of sanity see me through the wedding?

Like some terrible version of the Chinese water torture the unrelenting drip, drip ,drip of Royal Wedding propaganda erodes sanity and seeps into every tiny exposed crevice of the mind. I awoke screaming in the middle of the night having dreamt that our High Street was bedecked in Union Jacks from end to end with the usual dull parade of coffee outlets and estate agents resembling a 1980's NF rally. But it was no dream. Yesterday evening, bewitched by the idea of "from pitman to princess in five generations" her indoors actually watched a program about the Middletons. Personally I am more taken with the idea of the Windsors being forced down the mines but you know me.

2 comments:

henry said...

It was an interesting program. Lots of resentment from cousins, aunts, & uncles and a cruel put-down (by an aging female greataunt who didn't like the Windors much) of how Princess Katie getting picked as the Royal Breeder was down to a really pushy grandma who was all furcoat & no knickers. Great stuff. Roll on the divorce.

Gitane said...

Oh dear. Grab a seat and a bottle of Thatcher's finest cider (no irony meant) and read on.
The duchess and me would often escape from middle England and grab the ferry to Calais and top up on fags and plonk. Auchun in Boulogne was our usual destination and we discovered a weird little resort betwen Calais and Boulogne sur mer called "Le Portel". We experienced the resort in the company of the holidaying French who can best be described as lumpen. The petanque and barbeques were fantastic Hogarthian experiences. So far so good.
We weekended there many times over a number of years until the bodies of local girls, recently deceased, were found buried in the dunes which were littered with Nazi gun and cannon bunkers. The murderers were jailed but the whole atmosphere of the resort died in a few short months.
The real claim to fame of Le Portel was that Napoleon had tried to build a bridge across the channel to enable a marching army to invade England but had to abandon the project because of the attention of British Navy cannons and snipers. However a huge concrete rampart still remains to remind the French of their folly? Holidaymakers would harvest buckets of mussels from these concrete remains and we were often invited to share a fresh moules marnier.
The weekend of Di's funeral we hopped a ferry and arrived at Le Portel on the Friday and booked into our usual cheapo hotel/resto/bar. Unusually a few Brits were about and they were all in France to escape the kerching weep fest that had invaded middle England. Cool! We drank and feasted to the death of the royals etc etc.
However the following day, car loads of French prols turned up intent on passing the entire Saturday (if my memory serves)watching and wailing to the entire entombment of "La Princesse". Every bar and restaurant was packed with French mourners, there were rolls of toilet paper on the fucking pool table for weeping grandmothers. Comments like "C'est lui le Greque Nazi (meaning Ponce Philip)" and "Le pauvre cocue" (the poor cuckold) and more significantly " typiquement, le chaffeur etait bourre, c'est les anglais" and so on.
No escape pal, pick up your tools and go down to the allotment for a week. The duchess and me are off to fly kites on the South Coast.