Hallo Readers,
Last week, WTF told you that the Coronation would be a great spectacle and it was. When your place is in the world is diminished and you no longer have military domination and are down to your last aircraft carrier and three pea shooters, you have to take your pleasures where you can find them and there were pleasures aplenty to be found in the pageantry where lots of immaculately-turned out troops bedecked in crimson and gold with dead bears on their heads steaming in the damp and emitting noxious dead bear smells, marched in formation or rode a horse while blowing a trumpet or banging a drum – we know how to do that. We are the cham-pi-ons at that. Inflation is through the roof and our Government is crap but when it comes to parading through rainy streets to the theme of the Dam Busters, we have no rivals. Take that, foreign people….
WTF still cannot get to grips with the concept of Majesty, particularly where a couple of septuagenarians tried to walk in a straight line with bloody great crowns on their heads and trains the length of a football pitch. Tilt your head at the wrong angle and you could end up with zillions of pounds of nicked diamonds and pilfered solid gold rolling down the aisle without you. But the music! The spectacle! The rituals! Penny Mordaunt’s décolletage with her sword erect! mega-cute Royal kiddies. We smashed it. WTF found herself turning into someone wholly unrecognisable from her normal self. She was enraptured. She felt tenderly towards the Archbishop of Canterbury. (I know! I KNOW!!!!). She even bristled when the Anti Monarchist lot, minus the ones the Met Police nicked for no reason whatsoever, demonstrated outside the Palace after everyone else had gone home, shouting ‘Not My King!’ Was it all the champagne she consumed ? Was it the fact that this was the first such ceremony since before she was born? Goodness knows, but WTF’s friends and relations are having a whip-round to send her to Harley Street for an urgent consultation with a head doctor. Stat.
Meanwhile, for sheer entertainment, nothing beat the sight of Princess Anne dressed like Horatio Hornblower in breeches and a stupid tricorn hat with a massive red plume like a giant bottle brush.
She looked like something out of HMS Pinafore.
Actually, there was something better than the sight of Princess Anne dressed as Horatio Hornblower and that was Princess Anne dressed as Horatio Hornblower and sending a huge fuck-you to village-idiot Prince Harry by sitting in front of him during the ceremony and using the aforementioned massive bottle brush to obstruct our view of him and his view of everyone else, including the family he jettisoned to go and live in California. If there is one person to whom one would not say ‘er, Auntie, would you mind awfully removing your hat?’, it is Princess Anne. Prince Harry may have wiped out enemies various in Helmand Province but he would not dare to take on the Princess Royal. Still, imagine flying thousands of miles to attend your father’s coronation, forced to stay in a AirBnB at the far end of the Metropolitan Line and having to take an Uber to Westminster Abbey, and then not even seeing your father being coronated (as our American friends would say) because some plume is blocking the view. No wonder he buzzed off back to the airport and was airborne within 90 minutes of the King and Queen climbing into the Golden Coach and heading back to the Palace for a wave to the masses and a spot of coronation quiche. Who wants to be bettered by a feather? He could have saved himself the airfare and watched it on TV en famille…
Almost as diverting was the weird guest list. Including the ubiquitous and deeply annoying Joanna Lumley. WTF has never forgiven her for badgering Boris Johnson into committing himself to the stupidity that was the Garden Bridge based on her friendship with his family, whereupon £50m gurgled down the plughole without so much as a brick laid. But her outfit added fuel to that fire….
I mean, look at her. Who goes to a Coronation dressed as a District Nurse? And wearing what appear to be a pair of Sketchers on her feet?
And then there was Princess Charlene and her husband, the priapic Prince Albert of Monaco.
Albert has gone portly and looks like a theatre commissionaire, while his fragrant spouse, who purportedly cannot stand the sight of him, clearly left her intended outfit back in Monte Carlo by accident and had to borrow something to wear from an Emirates cabin crew member.
Gosh, she looks miserable, and it is not just the silly hat.
Worse was to come in the form of the flotilla of failure, to whit the previous living Tory Prime Ministers. Kill me now.
Yes, there was Theresa May in a Paddington bear hat, Boris Johnson looking like a sack of shit, as per usual and the Lady Jane Grey of British politics, Liz Truss, in a deeply unflattering, tit-hugging orange dress with matching chapeau and her customary gormless expression. The fact that she was there all is astonishing. The woman is beyond shameless. Anyone else who had tanked the economy and was beaten in a longevity stakes by a lettuce would have changed their name, had plastic surgery and moved to Outer Mongolia but Truss is made of sterner stuff. And at least she brushed her hair, unlike the ineffable Johnson…
His hair is like a loo brush, that shirt does not look fresh on and his collar has terminal wing-itis. Make him go away. Please.
And this next one can go as well. WTF speaks of Therese ‘Let Them Eat Turnips’ Coffey. Warning – put your breakfast fork down and do not spatter your hot beverage….
Red hat and matching nose, Union Jack scarf, white jacket, blue skirt last seen in the guise of Laura Ashley wallpaper circa 1974, horrible handbag. Like a bulldog in spectacles.
Why do English women dress so badly on these occasions? Sam in florals of her own label (Celfinn), Sarah in a maroon dress better suited to the office and feathers which appear to have landed randomly upon her head and Cherie in hideous pink like Miss Piggy with her head in a flowerpot. Just. Very. Bad.
As for the concert on the following day, it was putrid, featuring a line-up of has beens, never weres and people caterwauling out of tune apart from opera singers, Bryn Terfel and Andrea Boccelli, who were forced to warble You’ll Never Walk Alone. It was like a trip down memory lane, except it was a place you never wanted to go back to. Someone in the Royal Household has disinterred Take That when it would have been better to let them lie undisturbed. They sounded terrible and Mark Owen looked like Graham Nash’s older brother. It was more of a case of Take Them Away. And there was Katy Perry dressed in Vivienne Westwood, off key to the power of n.
If a box of Ferrero Rocher went to a fancy dress party dressed as a spatchcock oven-ready chicken, this is what it would look like.
And finally, we must sadly note the effects of too much interference with the workings of nature in the form of 73 year old Lionel Ritchie.
No one aged 73 has a face that smooth. No one. Some of it hardly moved. Sadly, the mouth still did. WTF was left wishing that her ears did not. Further, having butchered one song, Lionel then carried on and committed grievous bodily harm to a few more. Can we please stop subjecting our Royal Family to clapped out old codgers warbling tunelessly? Frankly, it would be kinder to send them to the guillotine.
OK Readers, that’s your lot for this week. Keep sending on your comments and topics for Its Got To Go (no room this week, alas. Let us meet again next Friday. Be good xx
Leave a ReplyCancel reply