I put the news on this evening to catch up on local election results in England and Wales. Fifteen minutes in, and they’re still talking sycophantic shite about the coronation, teasing out breathless intelligence from assorted nobodies like the Hon. Cecil Trust-Fund Arselicker and his toothy fiancée Lucy.

Sycophancy around the royals is nothing new, of course, and you’d think that broadcasters and the press would show some public awareness of what they know privately. It does strike me, though, how tone deaf this stuff is. I wrote about this last September soon after the death of the queen (https://www.cosmicsurfer.co.uk/2022/09/18/apres-moi-le-deluge) and want to return to it because I was chatting about it earlier this week with an elderly member of the family.

In my earlier post I wrote,

This is not the country that it was when Elizabeth became the monarch; nonetheless, like the ship of Theseus, there is a sense of deep continuity that she herself represented, and I suspect that lies at the heart of a lot of the reaction to her death. With her passing, something has finally been lost symbolically as well as in reality. The institutions of the United Kingdom have long been in decline, and implicit respect for those institutions has attenuated proportionately to the lack of reciprocal respect shown by those same institutions to us. In truth, the country of which Elizabeth became queen was finally extinguished when Johnson and his cabal of chancers and bullshitters lied to her with impunity to hammer through their pet programme of national suicide.

 

That is why the narrative being pumped onto the beaches and into our fresh water systems stinks: it is the wrong story with the wrong emotional arcs and touchpoints; it jibes because the narrative of national mourning is being superimposed onto a much more nuanced society that is resistant to being emotionally manipulated for the benefit of a hereditary elite before whom we are expected to tug our forelocks.

We are a month short of seventy years since the coronation of Elizabeth on 2 June 1953. It is trite to say that the world and our country have changed since 1953, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Our understanding of who we are (literally – DNA was first described as a double helix in 1953) and our place in the world have been transformed. Even in our current economic circumstances, we are not the shattered industrial country trying to recover from a world war that had only ended eight years previously. Neither had we seen Bill Anders’s 1968 photo of the earth rising above the moon.

Our society has also been transformed (and enriched) by immigration and by freedoms rooted in the changes of the 1960s and 70s. Edinburgh is nothing like 1977 when I first moved here, when the Church of Scotland still dominated civic life and nary a pavement café was to be found (or countenanced.) Membership of the EU and cheap and easy international travel have changed our expectations and assumptions of society and what we can aim for.

The flouncing flummeries that we are being force fed fall flat because they fail to face the facts of change. The narrative around the coronation is more dissonant than Schoenberg and Webern simultaneously playing different compositions on out-of-tune pianos. You want culture wars? There’s one festering right there.

Oh, btw, the WHO says Covid-19 is no longer a global emergency.