Reflections on the royal wedding - parties

There was, in the next street along, an honest to God street party, with tables and bunting and a sound system and everything. It actually sounded quite fun especially when, after it had being going for some time and they were getting ready to wind down for the evening, a somewhat refreshed housewife invited everyone back to hers to continue the festivities.

Our own party was a somewhat smaller but no less restrained affair in the back garden. The correct effect was achieved by stringing Union Flag bunting around the garden shed. The garden shed is perhaps the greatest symbol of Britishness there is, and the same can be said of the Union Flag. Combining them more or less went most of the way to restoring the British Empire to greatness, as a bunting bedecked shed stood proud as the greatest symbol of what it is to be British and alive under a perfect sky. Truly a day to pity republicans.

Reflections on the royal wedding - eccentricities

The population of Great Britain is, what, sixty three million and by my reckoning at least sixty two and a half million of them are eccentric. It was interesting to see the crowds that camped out to secure a good place to view the procession, and easy to mock them. Less easy to mock them after the Princes came out to shake some hands and say hello the night before the wedding, which fell into the 'gob smack' category of impressive. Folk queue all night for rock gig tickets or, god help them, new apple stuff and you don't see Mick Jagger or Steve Jobs rocking up to say hello to the crowd the night before the gig. But I couldn't resist the seditious thought that it would be good if somebody was revealed not to be a fan but rather a pervert who liked to shag crowd barriers and had got his knob stuck.

Reflections on the royal wedding - pageantry

It was just a good job that the event itself was so breathtaking. Nobody does pageantry like the British and the sight of trees in Westminster Abby was quite something, as was the spectacle of seeing the horse guards and household cavalry trotting down the Mall, knowing that just last week these same chaps were cheerfully throttling Taliban scumbags.

Reflections on the royal wedding - media

The media build up to the day itself was, to put it mildly, frothing. On the day itself the event was as inescapable as gravity. It started with the Today programme on Radio four. This is normally a programme that follows a rather tight format, they have some spurious stories about the latest survey showing that red wine cures smallpox or something, a bit of sport and then the main event, which is one of the two remarkably offensive old gits that present the thing having a go at a politician about something. Since they banned badger fights it's about the only blood sport left and tends to leave the listener exhausted and bitter and still to face the day.

Instead of a belligerent bully belittling a windbag minister, we had jolly presenters out talking to the crowds that had already started to line the route. Surely the BBC missed a trick here, because the questions were uniformally of the 'where have you come from?' and 'are you looking forward to seeing the dress?' variety. I would have liked to have heard the same level of rigour and challenge that is aimed at politicians aimed at some loyalist royalist, with interruptions, accusations of factual inaccuracies and downright insults, although I appreciate that hearing a BBC presenter being beaten to death with his own microphone is not to everyone's taste.

Reflections on the royal wedding - the weather

Last Friday's Royal wedding gave the British a perfect storm of legitimacy to speculate about the weather, a Big Occasion on a bank holiday weekend. In terms of micro-climates, there was probably very high temperatures around the server that does the BBC weather Internet site as their weather page got more hits than a butt at an archers' convention, combined with a lot of hot air from folk gassing about the weather every time they met.

On the day, the weather was perfect, cloudy in the morning to keep the crowds cool and then, during the ceremony, the sun actually came out. This was because, it was explained to me, God is an Englishman. This actually makes a great deal of sense explaining as it does why so many previously inexplicably ghastly things happen to foreign people.