Monday, 19 August 2013

gorgeous george....

My wife and I went for a lovely bike ride together yesterday.  Rather than dwell on the unfortunate collision that saw C. catapulted into the canal and that sent me sprawling across the towpath, both of us picking up various grazes, cuts, bruises and possible cracked ribs... rather than dwell on that, I'll tell you about something else we saw along the way.

About an hour before the incident we won't be discussing, to be exact.

We were cycling through Wilford.  Wilford is a nice enough little village just down the river Trent from Nottingham.  Well, it's a bit grand calling it a village, really.  Nowadays it's a collection of housing estates of various ages.  It's pleasant enough, and has a village green and a reasonable pub that's nice for a pint on a sunny day, although not as good with food as it used to be.

As villages now seem to do, they've got a website too (google it for yourself...if they're going to ego surf, then they can at least do a bit of work for the trackback).  It has the name of the local bobby and various local interest news stories - in this case mostly about the various traffic schemes that are taking place in the area to widen the A453 and to close Wilford Lane for the tram works.  They also have a little widget on their homepage that tracks the price of petrol against the price of oil and the cheapest local petrol station to buy it.  You know the kind of thing.  Conservative MP, conservative residents, with a small "c".  Oh, and a Facebook page... where they seem to mostly be arguing about the shoddy standards in the pub, someone's overgrown hedge and some vigilante who is spray-painting around dog poo that isn't being picked up.  Exciting times!  Good luck to them, I say.  Community is good, right?

Anyway.  I digress.  What caught our eyes as we cycled through the village green was that someone has put up a sign celebrating the birth of a new heir to the throne.  Wilford Village, it seems, were keen to share in the joy of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and to let the world know it.  Now, I'm not in the least bit excited by this kind of thing and don't really understand why, in this day and age, people seem so ready to accept that some people are just BORN better than others.  Still, each to their own.  What I can't abide though is the inaccuracy.  Unless that sign has been there since 14th November 1948, then surely the heir to the throne hasn't been born, has he?  I'm not a fan of the family, so perhaps I'm a little rusty on how this all works, but wasn't the new royal born a few weeks back third in line to the throne?  Charles then William then this one?  Surely any royalist interested enough to put up a sign would know that much, at least?  An heir, perhaps... but then again, aren't we all probably an heir to the throne of somewhere if we went far enough back in our family trees?  Hell, if Henry Tudor can be king, then you clearly don't need MUCH of a claim, do you?  Just a good army and an act of Parliament and you're in....

Or perhaps it's a statement?  An anti-Charles protest of some sort?  Now, you might not be a big fan of the current heir, but if you're going to support a hereditary monarchy, then I'm afraid you don't get to choose the order of succession.  Well, you could take the parliamentary route and chop off Charles' head, I suppose.... but think of all the lost tourism!

Other than that, you're just going to have to lump it.


  1. From their facebook page, I can see that not everyone is a fan of the sign. It was defaced.... perhaps by the phantom dog poo sprayer?

  2. I imagine PC Matt Pooley is hot on the heels of the culprit as we speak....

  3. Bah to the Windsors! I really hoped that William and Harry, having grown up in the modern world, and under a tabloid frenzy, would, upon reaching adulthood, turn round and denounce the whole charade. Clearly the conditioning is too strong.

  4. I wish them no ill, and all the best with the new baby and all.... but the feudal deference just makes me feel ill. Surely we're past the point where we just unquestioningly see these people as our betters. Aren't we?
    I actually caught a programme about the air sea rescue station where William is based, and fair play to the man, that's a job worth doing. And at least Harry has been in the army in a meaningful sense - certainly compared to his father and uncles, anyway. WItness all the fucking fuss about how William married a "commoner" though. A commoner with millionaire parents who hang around with the polo set. Spare me. Nice teeth and good hair though, and they needed the genetic boost, to be honest.

  5. Oh, and in case anyone does wheel out the tourism argument, you do know that Legoland is a bigger tourist attraction than windsor castle, right?

  6. On the tourism front - we could still have the changing of the guards and stuff. It's not like the guys in the bearskin hats do actually protect the monarch, that'll be some blokes in suits and with neat little machine guns I imagine. Does Trooping the Colour become any more meaningless in the absence of an eighty odd year old woman, or a member of her family? And if we got rid of them, the tourists could really have a good nosey round Buckingham Palace.

    You're right about the jobs that they've had. Though I think it might be more accurate to describe them as hobbies in their cases.