Tiaras. Tar. Ta-ta.
cannons fire in the royal parks — approaching autumn
I watched the funeral with the wife and kids because it was history after all and I wanted them to forge some kind of memory of the moment. Just so, when asked what they were doing during the Queen’s funeral, they could say, “Playing Splatoon 3.” I can’t say that there was much about the pageantry or banal accompanying commentary that moved me. There were a few points where I pointed and said “I used to live there” but that was about it. There was an undeniable melancholy that crept in when the coffin lowered. Enough for me to feel aggrieved when they cut to the piper. I get it. There was definitely some artistry in the image of a lone, retreating figure. But I wanted to see that coffin vanish into darkness. I wanted that hole in the cathedral floor to swallow the coffin, the flags, the black hats, the hymn sheets, that whole shallow gene pool, the duchies, the sycophants and rubbernecks, the whole sorry parade. Just like the ark of the covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
A few weeks later, some workmen carved all the old tarmac from the main road on our route to school and rolled out a new stretch of tar. There was a beauty to it, like someone had dragged the flat side of a landscaping rake across a cooling stream of lava. It felt sticky and warm as I crossed it with my kids. Even the reliably unpleasant smell of hot tar couldn’t ruin it. They then painted the necessary white and yellow lines and it was a road again. I wanted to take a photo but I thought I might come across as someone that wanted to complain to the council. Explaining that I found it beautiful might have mortified my kids. So please enjoy this picture I just took of some horses on a housing estate instead.
I saw the new coins on the news this morning with Charles’s head pointing in the opposite direction to his mother. You could make two coins look like they’re chatting to each other, or swap them over and pretend they’ve just fallen out. I could also imagine the whole nation saying, “the money looks wrong” in unison. Stare at the new coins for long enough and all you see is that single ear pointing right at you. I know that every coin has featured a profile portrait for centuries but this coin really seemed like one that I could whisper into. They say that the monarch functions as a symbol rather than a person but I’d rather place my constitutional faith in a massive ear. It could be grown in a lab from a royal stem cell if the lineage is so important. We could line up for days to whisper into it, whatever we liked, and know that our secrets would be safe. They could carry the ear into parliament on a raised platform every year. It would be the people’s ear but also an ear that is better than all of us. An ear that the red arrows could fly over. God save the ear.
I can’t help but remember that Benjamin Franklin quote, “…nothing is certain except death and taxes” and how it describes the current news cycle. I might have posted something witty about it if I hadn’t managed to remain logged out of the hellish bird site for a week. You may think that I have been touching grass and smelling flowers but, as seen above, I’ve just been swooning over tarmac instead. My trick was to change the password to the strong autosuggestion, not save it and then log out. I might still return in a few months for the sole purpose of nuking my account. Nothing makes more of a waste of the soul than a yearning for clout, especially when we do it under the impression that we are doing something good. It makes monsters of the best of us.