Tag Archives: Coronation

Not, entirely what you think it is, this one …

OK, so it’s been a long time, there’s been a fabulous holiday, an equally fabulous author event—the Indie Author Book Fair in St Ives—which genuinely was wonderful by the way. There’s been rather a lot to do in the garden and for Mum. As a result, I’ve walked a little closer to burn-out than I’ve wanted to, hence, no blog. But this week I’ve done a little writing, I’ve had a lie in and I have another one on Monday and things have been a bit more relaxing and quite … interesting so I thought I’d share them with you.

McOther and I have decided to have a new floor in our kitchen. See picture. This involved having it re-tiled, which, in turn, involved removing everything in it. I had no idea how much stuff we had in the kitchen and conservatory until it was strewn liberally about the house. Yeh. Now I know. Another factor was that there were times when we couldn’t walk on the tiles, and that involved one rather hairy evening when we couldn’t access the oven. Take away pizzas for us that night.

Then there’s the weather. The kitchen table, the island from the middle of the room, the dishwasher and the fridge were outside on the patio. Entirely fortuitously, I’d been buying a plastic greenhouse from Wilco last week (£40 and they last about 7 years) and I noticed they were also selling plastic sheeting. Wrap this round fruit trees over winter and they escape the dreaded leaf curl. With that in mind, I’d bought some. Seven metres to be precise. We opened it up, draped it over the white goods and table, and hoped it wouldn’t rain.

Speaking of rain, the forecast was good but only for a short while and of course, there was a bank holiday, so in order to ensure they got the full amount of work required done in the day, the tilers arrived at 7.30 am sharp on Tuesday. I had to forego parents’ swim, which I was a bit nettled about, so McOther could go to his bought-and-paid-for French class but actually it was lucky I did as they needed various cupboards emptied, the larder being one of them. It took a while but I managed to remove it all in time for them to put the first layer of gloop down for the tiles to go onto.

Over the three days they did sterling work and did different bits at different times so that, after the first night, we could walk into the kitchen etc. However, the weather was beginning to look a bit ominous. On the second night, half of it was grouted and could be walked on, the other half was glued but not grouted so if we went on there we had to step in the middle of the tiles only –yes, because otherwise the bears would get us! No! Not because of the stupid effing bears you daft fucking tart  where was I? Oh yeh, because otherwise, the tiles might move.

McOther went to collect McMini from school and looking outside at the ominously gathering clouds I realised it might be going to rain. The white goods and the island were back indoors by this time, not where they should be but on a part of the floor which was now set and solid. The table was nestling happily under the (now) folded-in-half polythene sheet but there was a bamboo chair sitting out there, with a foam cushion. It’s more of a cat hammock to be honest, one of those round bamboo cup and saucer ones, I think the technical term is a pappadum chair. It was open to the elements but I realised I could put the bamboo bits of the chair on top of the fridge and dishwasher and the cushion on top of those. It was tricky because there was only one tile in the ‘walkable’ half next to the double doors but I managed it and got the two bamboo bits in. Brilliant, now for the cushion.

As I brought the cushion in, I passed an old plant pot which was on the windowsill. The pot contained a dead plant and a lot of very dry earth …

Can you guess what happened next kids?

That’s right. I caught it with the cushion and it fell down. The saucer in which it was standing smashed and the horrible dried out compost went all over the fucking floor.

Which bit of the floor d’you think it spattered over? The bit that was already grouted and dry or the bit that was only glued? That’s right, kids. The bit that was only glued. And where d’you think the earth went? Where would it go?

That’s right, into all the cracks of, fucking, course!

For a moment, I stood there motionless. Had that actually just happened?

Of course it sodding well had.

Fuckorama.

On the upside, to my left, on the windowsill, I spied the hoover.

On the downside, it’s a handheld jobbie and works for 10 minutes on a charge … how much was left? I glanced at my watch trying desperately to work out how long it had been since McOther departed to collect McMini and if I had enough time to clear up the mess before he came home, saw it and went into orbit.

I started with the dustpan and brush, sweeping up the bits from the middles of the tiles because lord knew I didn’t want any more of it going down the chuffing cracks. Then I got hoovering carefully sucking the crap out from between the tiles without pressing down on them. The clock was ticking but I was making excellent progress, indeed, I was nearly there. Would I manage to disappear all this shit before McOther returned …?

Of course I fucking wouldn’t.

I was down to the last three tiles when I was suddenly conscious of a wave of extreme disapproval so solid I could almost feel it as a physical pressure. Yep. McOther was home and yes, predictably, he was absolutely incandescent. To give him his due, he understood what I’d been trying to do and realised I’d the best of intentions so he didn’t shout at me and he wasn’t angry with me per se. He was just a very silent, tight-lipped, angry man about the whole situation for a considerable time afterwards.

My mistake was to try and make each bit perfect before moving onto the next one. I should have just bodged it all, and then kept primping at it until the whole thing was perfect. That way, it would have looked clean enough for him not to notice and I could have just hoovered up the bits he didn’t see after he’d gone to bed.

He is aware that a lot of this kind of stuff happens which he never knows about. Because he doesn’t need to be distressed unnecessarily … although I often tell him about it afterwards. Beiong caught in the act, or telling him, at the time, as events unfold is never a good idea. Unless something’s gone wrong that transpires to be unfixable.

The floor is fine by the way. I got every last scrap of that bastard compost out of the cracks. I’m just grateful it was dry.

Other crowning glories …

Yeh, in case you didn’t notice there was a coronation in my country this week. Anyone who has read my books will know I have a bit of a thing for arcane ritual. When my brother and I were small we used to draw the curtains to make some proper dark, light candles which we’d stolen from the cupboard downstairs (our poor parents) and then parade around, dressed in sheets, singing ‘plain chant’. Mostly a limerick about beans done in thirds. Yeh, this is why McMini’s eccentricities don’t faze me as much as they might.

Anyway, what I’m saying here is that I do love a bit of arcane ritual and a coronation promises to be as bizarre and arcane as it gets so I was agog …

It didn’t disappoint.

Oh and I absolutely loved it by the way, I thought it was really good, but a) I’m a very high church Anglican so I love all that wandering around in cloaks with people holding bits of them out of the way for you so they don’t flap your frilly bits into the holy stuff and knock it flying, or, heaven forfend, spill the consecrated bits so you have to spend the next ten minutes licking any and every piece of consecrated material off the floor. It’s a bit like James Brown being ‘helped’ onto the stage for an encore in his purple cloak; glorious, glorious theatre.

Yes, a coronation costs a lot of money, but it also keeps thousands of people in jobs, god knows how many crafts people working, a whole shit load of heritage crafts alive plus, farming, animals, plants etc are preserved. Remember everyone taking the piss out of Charles for talking to the trees and banging on about conservation and global warming. Yeh who’s laughing now? And considering the other shit the State funds and how much that costs, whinging about the cost of this is like ignoring a suitcase of money behind you and instead, choosing to chisel at the 50p piece someone’s stuck onto the pavement with superglue as a joke. I’ve used that metaphor about going after ‘benefit fraud’ instead of making corporate monoliths who run the world (and government) pay more tax but it’s a good metaphor for this, too, so it’s staying.

While we’re here, the people who run this world are the super-rich and giant companies, who through the sheer weight of their riches and ‘regulatory capture’ (or mates in high places, as the rest of us call it) get round the rules do what they like. They do what they do to earn more money and nothing gets in the way of that. Even though they are richer than three quarters of the actual nations on this planet people like Bezos, Musk, Trump et all (I’ve chosen these three at random) appear to have no notion of anything but swelling their coffers and little regard for the people whose work feeds their greed.

Politicians are supposed to care for their people but very few of them do. At the moment, we have a man among those glitterati who does genuinely appear to want to help people. OK it’s a King Man, but like his mother before him, he’s one of the few in high places who come close to caring and he’s the only person among those top flight glitterati who has anything like the power and newsworthiness required to make other people think. Or at least, one of only a handful who can who appears to actually want to.  And it’s a shit job. I’ve done the whole goldfish life and it’s not easy if you aren’t cut out for it and he had no choice whereas I did. So yes, while I am mostly socialist, I don’t buy the non-monarchy line. I don’t vote for any political party regularly as I vote for my principles, and the party that gets my vote is whichever party is the nearest fit with those principles at the time.

MTM steps off soap box. Right. So I watched the coronation. And I enjoyed it.

Highlights …? First, the way the King and Queen were smiling at people as they processed, in slow state, up the aisle, it looked like the odd grin at people they knew or recognised and it immediately gave the whole thing, ridiculously formal as it was, an upbeat informality. Yeh. I know, but that’s how it came over. It was a bit like attending the wedding of a couple who, you just know in your heart, are going to be very happily married. It’s formal, there’s ritual and  you want the theatre to go right for them but they are clearly very comfortable with each other and the machinery around them. That kind of thing.

Then there’s Penny Mordant parading around with the Sword of State like some avenging Valkyrie … but she’s fresh from day release to Olympus for work experience and still wearing the uniform. She had to do a lot of gym work to hold it up for that long, apparently. That was a belter of an outfit too. I think Penny silently stole a big part of the show, but not too much, merely … enough.

The blessing of the crown, watching the Archbishop hold a 2kg lump of jewel-encrusted metal aloft in front of him for what was, quite clearly, a lot longer than he found comfortable.

The anointing? Woah. He takes off his clothes, goes behind a screen and actually strips off … in church? That’s … a hell of a thing. He gets dabbed in various places with holy oil, including his chest, so you can stop snickering at the back because it’s only his top he takes off. It’s church though so he must get fucking cold. I was particularly intrigued to see that medieval style clothing is very similar from East to West.

I couldn’t find a social media post to share of him wearing it and the belt, and I daren’t share anything else, so this will have to do. But once he had the belt on then, stick the right kind of Saracen helmet on him, and he could have stepped out of Saladin’s court from a Ladybird book about the Crusades in these duds. Or an illustration of medieval Chinese noblemen.

So … what do we learn from this? That, if we go far enough back everyone wore a dressing gown.

Three changes of costume though! THREE! He swapped the very lovely red Nehru jacket, which I rather coveted in a closet New Romantic kind of way, for something very, very gold. And reminiscent of something you might see worn by a Mongol lord in a medieval illustration, or a full-length figure off a medieval coin.

And did I mention it was very gold. And very heavy, presumably. If it had been lead then, come the apocalypse, I reckon it could have been used to shelter several people from radiation. And it was very medieval but at the same time, because it was so spangly, there was also that dash of 1960s Klingon about the glitteryness of the fabric which merely added to the mystique.

And also Dr Who. As they cleared the screens away, for a few minutes, there, I wondered if our new King is also a Timelord.

Although Timelords are based on historical costumes from the medieval era, principally Venice (the 1970s and 80s ones at any rate, lean heavily on that portrait of Doge Lorenzo Loredan which is from the 1400s but it’s as near as dammit).

Sorry, gone off on a tangent there.

The throne (snortle) … the revered 700 year old—or is it 800 years old—throne which has been defaced by generations of school boys at Westminster School.

Also gold. Of a different kind. Comedy gold. Because … really?

In my Dad’s house, at Lancing College (Gibbs) the very junior boys didn’t have an individual study, there was, basically, a cube farm, which was called a houseroom and everyone in their first two years had a cubicle in there. Except that in the second year some of them moved up to ‘the settle’ which was this ancient wooden bench in front of the fire. After that they then went on to ‘a pit’ which was an individual study. There was a kitchenette off to one side of the houseroom with a grill and a hot plate, which enjoyed a regular supply of milk, butter and sliced bread but if you were a member of ‘the settle’ you could toast that bread over the gas fire. The room perennially smelled of beeswax polish and toast with a hint of gas (from the pipes not the boys although there probably was a bit of both).

‘The settle’ was covered in graffiti. Every boy who’d been through that house had gouged his name deeply into the wood until the whole thing was knobbly with graffiti and there were names, on the names, on the names and very little plain wood anywhere. I’ve no clue if it’s there now. I hope it is. Likewise, I’ve no clue if everyone carved their names in it but one of them was singing in the choir at the coronation yesterday. My dad would have been so proud.

Thing is, The Settle … that’s at Lancing College. It wasn’t founded until 1848 and I think the present site was built in the 1860s (but don’t quote me on that). My point is it’s not that old, so it’s not quite such heights of vandalism to gouge your name into the settle as it is to gouge it into the throne upon which Henry VIII was crowned.

Word up, I did not expect the actual Fucking Throne of Fucking England (Yes that’s its full title. You didn’t know that did you?) to be the Westminster School equivalent of ‘the settle’ in Victorian times. Mainly because as stated, the Fucking Throne was over 700 years old before the little bastards even got carving. Except that, clearly the Westminister School equivalent of ‘The Settle’ is exactly what it was.

Holy. Fucking. Fuck! There is something joyously ironic about this. If I’d written that into a book, it would be dismissed as a bit over-the-top. Mwahahargh. Not. So. It was also, clearly, horrifically uncomfortable, especially to a man with an arthritic back who suffers from sciatica. You could see him shift position and wince every now and again.

Then there was ‘the giving of the presents’ I dunno what this bit was really called but … the special attributes. No, not eyes in the back of the head, a thimble, box and ring of state but … WAIT! Hang on! There WAS a ring of state. Mwahahahrgh! But I don’t think it was shrink-to-fit. And a bible, and some spurs, a sword, The Orb (no relation to the 1990s popular music combo) a sword and a couple of rod things which he has to hold in each hand so he’s got nothing to save himself with if he falls. Yep, if he trips over a dog or something with that lot on, he’s going to go flat on his face. And there’s the whole discombobulating effect of having one hand gloved and one hand … not.

Which reminds me … One glove!? One giant, beautifully embroidered, 1950’s-style-motorcycle-gauntlet-type glove. All this phaff and he only gets one? Where’s the other fucking glove? Did they drop it? Imagine being the bloke with the cushion. Shit I’ve dropped one somewhere. Fuck! Where is it? I’ll have to go back. Shit! No time. Oh no! Wait! There it is! Bollocks that security bloke’s just tripped over it and kicked it under the organ. We’ll never get it out in time. Shit and there’s my cue. What do I do? What do I do? Fuckity fuck! I’ll just have to blag it with one for now, go back and find the other and hand it to him in a quiet bit later on.

Imagine him riding his Norton in full regalia, the golden cloak dragging along behind him billowing out behind him in the wind but miraculously, without taking his head off, because this image is for cinematic effect, rather than real, with only one fucking glove on? What the …?

What happened? Were the glove makers like me at school? Was it this kind of conversation?

‘He wants two. You know that right?’
‘Shit! No! I didn’t see that part of the brief.’
‘It was over the page.’
‘What?!!! Noooo! I didn’t see that …’
‘Bummer mate.’
‘But now what do I do? He’s supposed to wear them to-actual-morrow! I can’t make another one in time. What do I doooo?’
‘Search me mate.’
‘OK, calm. Breathe … there’s  nothing I can do, there’s no time to make another one now, I’ll just have to face the music; give him the one you have made and explain … Maybe he’ll understand.’**

So there’s the poor guy with one glove, and one not-glove, and rod, and staff and clothes that are made of solid gold and weigh approximately one metric tonne*.

*OK probably not but you get the gist and it sounds funnier.
** I know it’s a hawking glove but admitting that ruins the comic effect, such as it is.

Putting the crowns on. Again, I was completely riveted by this bit. First trying to get it on to the King’s head. ‘Careful! You’re going to crick the poor man’s neck. He’ll have neuralgia for weeks!’

Also enjoyed that Queen Camilla, who always strikes me as a down-to-earth, hands-on, practical kind of person, had to pretty much sit on her hands, they kept coming into shot as she instinctively went to put her crown on, herself.

At some point, I’m not sure when because I went to the loo, the King seemed to have changed clothes again and put on a purple silk jacket which I would have coveted even more greatly than the red one as a New Romantic/Goth-in-colour teenager.

A thought about crowns … I can’t work out if Crowns look quite cool or absolutely fucking ridiculous. I noticed the King was wearing a different one when he came out onto the balcony, I’m thinking, his mother’s. But it wasn’t gold, presumably it was lighter, because the gold one weighs a fucking tonne and he’d have ended up with a stiff neck for the next ten weeks***. Poor man, he probably has anyway. But … they do make your head look really big. Or maybe I’m just not used to such tall hats. I dunno.

***OK 2kg/5lbs but you get the picture

The coach. Yeh. That looked horrendous too. There were all the others moving smoothly along, meanwhile you can see the finials on the four corners of the coronation coach bobbing up and down as it crested the tiniest bump. They must have been about ready to hurl when they reached the palace. No wonder they arrived in a different one. Graffitied the Throne may be may be, but it’s not the great-white-telephone kind of throne, after all.

No wonder the poor man asked for quiche for Coronation lunch. Comfort food. That’s what he wanted. And after all that malarkey I would too. Jeez. I suspect all they felt like doing was to go to bed early and sit there in their PJs, with the telly on, eating a cheese omelette each off a tray. I sincerely hope they got to do that … you know … if they wanted to.

For many reasons, I think the best photo of the whole day has to be this one.