CHANGING OF THE GUARD

 

"Move along please madam."

CHANGING OF THE GUARDS - BOB DYLAN

I guess you'd have to be on another planet not to have noticed reporting of the last gasps of the British monarchy over the weekend. The Queen, ER Indoors seems to be handing over the reins at last to her eldest prat Charles who no doubt will make an almighty cock up of the role.  Not that this matters of course as the whole shebang is on shaky ground and this 'last gasp' of pageantry is probably the last we will ever see of unentitled titled privilege and misuse of taxpayers money.

Eat your hearts out America and Donald Trump

Now don't get me wrong - even if I'm not a royalist I still think that old Liz has done a pretty good job of waving the flag and, for over 70 years has managed to mostly to retain dignity and respect for the royal institution even when family and close connections have tried to, unwittingly scupper it. It's just that it's now time to move on. There isn't anyone of quality in the royal line-up to merit the crown and who is capable of holding the monarchy and even the family together. This is kind of like US politics where, unbelievably. neither the republicans nor the democrats can field worthy candidates to take on the position of president. They're fucked as well.

Meanwhile, in the UK the media has desperately been trying to put a gloss on a fading star.

Breathless commentary has been tried and failed. After all, what can you say about a bunch of in-bred, over privileged and undereducated fops that hasn't already been said on the scandal pages of the Sunday newspapers over the last few years. We know about Charles and his wife's peccadillos and mad habits. We sort of know about how dull the next pretenders -  William and his very proper wife are - but there's not much of interest there. The dipstick younger son of Charles, Harry and his under-talented but ambitious wife make news but essentially are about as insubstantial as the idiots Johnny Depp and Amber Heard.

Andrew the alleged pedophile (was) kept out of the limelight and the rest of the siblings, cousins, concubines and hangers on stood about dressed up in what looked like clothing from a fancy dress outfitters.

So what did the press do? They did what they usually do, they found new 'interesting' stories and zeroed in on the new generations of royals, particularly William and Kate's kids. These over-indulged, spoilt and insufferable brats were cooed over and every little tantrum or outburst were analysed and breathtakingly approved of.

I tell you what- there's no way that Queen Liz would have tolerated that behaviour from her offspring when they were kids and I can imagine her husband old grumpy-guts Philip giving them a clip around the ear or a boot up the arse.

But then, I'm from another generation and have a different set of values. Like the queen I guess.