Tomorrow is the big day and the celebrations will be spectacular. But before you head out for an evening of cerveza and tacos, you can get up early and watch the Official Coronation of King Charles III.
In fact, if you get up early enough, it’s nearly all you can watch, though our local Fox affiliate mostly airs program-length commercials at that hour. And at others.
As the two magazine covers above indicate, the UK is fascinated by the whole thing, though hardly united in how they feel about it. But it’s exploitable from either direction.
Before I got up the ranks in newspaper work, I thought Special Commemorative Issues were some kind of public service, but I got over it. At some point in 2002, a few weeks before the Sept 11 anniversary, my boss, the circulation director, got a memo from corporate wanting to know how we planned to duplicate our single-copy sales from September 12, which was complicated by the fact that we’d put out an Extra on the afternoon of the 11th.
But it never mentioned sacrifice or mourning or any of that. Just sales.
I said, “Well, we could rent a couple of airplanes …”
At least this time around, they’re making money from the living, which is not only a nice touch from those Sept 11 commemorative issues but from the Dead Celebrity special issues that fill the magazine racks at the grocery store checkouts.
Cathy Wilcox, cartooning from Australia where the love of pommy bastards is oft times sometime muted, offers this guide to the Royal Stuff, which seems to prove the persistence of memory down there, since my search for oatcake references drew articles about the Duchess of Cornwall from three years ago.
Her fellow countryperson, First Dog on the Moon, goes more in depth to analyze the Royal Accoutrements, as well as providing a script for those who wish to follow Charlie’s wish that everyone take an oath of special allegiance to his royal self.
The Oath of Special Allegiance is only a wish, mind you. A suggestion. Because, as Guy Venables points out, Charlie was only a prince when he said it. If he says it again tomorrow afternoon, it will be a Royal Command and he can snick off your head if you don’t take the pledge, or at least order your rebel ass transported to Van Diemen’s Land where you’ll have to live alongside people like Cathy Wilcox and First Dog.
As Dave Brown notes, they don’t put up with disloyalty in England, and if anyone’s head is going to be snicked off, he won’t be named Charles. Again.
Though Ben Jennings recognizes the announcement that non-disruptive protests will be permitted despite some earlier discussions of possibly intimidating and arresting such disloyal people.
It just has to be kept within reasonable limits, which is probably okay because, while the price of eggs has come down here in the US, they’re still pretty expensive in Brexitland, which narrows the usual options for disruptive protesters.
Though apparently they still have lawnmowers.
The price of eggs not only makes them expensive to hurl, but turns the Official Coronation Lunch Treat a bit expensive to make. It could, as Matt suggests, touch off a whole other wave of protests.
Peter Brookes seems to reflect a bit of “Let Them Eat Quiche” in this, and, by the way, the Tories took a pretty good licking in yesterday’s elections.
And that despite new voter ID laws, though they did their best.
Glen LeLievre (Cartoon Movement) can’t imagine why, though, given that the Coronation is estimated to cost 250 million pounds — or, as we say here in the colonies, $315,163,530 — maybe Charlie could toss coins out of one side of the Royal Coach and Camilla could toss them out the other.
Still, quiche is good for you and represents the new monarch’s dedication to healthy eating, because the recipe for Coronation Quiche “contains spinach, broad beans and tarragon, which might be a nod to his sustainable agriculture commitment.”
Coronation Quiche! It’s easy to make and impossible to make up!
But that didn’t stop Ann Telnaes from adding her perspective to the whole Royal Shebang, while one of my favorite British imports, Arwa Mahdawi, concedes that the colonists don’t seem particularly besotted with the whole thing, the way they were the last time Charlie got everyone up at 5 am to watch him ride a carriage.
Can’t blame it all on the change of co-stars.
The problem may be that, over here, we built a whole subculture based on the fact that most of us didn’t recognize Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche (1982) as satire.
Or maybe it’s just that, parody or not, Real Men Don’t Get Up At Five AM to watch a man in a hat sit on a chair.
Anxiously we await the test to see whether Charles Phillip Arthur George Mountbatten Halifax Pendragon Orange Tudor Ole Ptang Ptang Biscuit Barrel Don’t Sleep In The Subway Darling Windsor Rex III can successfully eat the Scone of Stone with the Spoon of Spleen.
Is May 5 still National Cartoonists Day? Yikes! The NCS website doesn’t even call it out! Not that I can see at least.
>Is May 5 still National Cartoonists Day?
Yes, but it’s spelled “Cinco de Mayo” — hence the confusion
Mike
Thanks for letting me enjoy something I don’t care about.
The last extra the Akron Beacon Journal published was on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963.
And this just wasted whole column carrying on about something “nobody” cares about.
People are flying to London to stand on the roadside for a 10-second glimpse of something nobody cares about, and major networks are assigning senior reporters to the non-event. But glad you liked it!
Will likely be on a ferry from Scotland to Northern Ireland when you post on Coronation Day. Maybe it’s because we’re not in England, but things have seemed pretty subdued with respect to tomorrow’s events.
The guy who wrote “Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche” was my boss.
He was the editor of Boston University’s student newspaper, The Daily Free Press. I was the typesetter.
After “Quiche” he went on to write for James Bond movies and video games. He pronounces his last name “fear-steen.”
He became more famous than I ever did, but at the moment someone with my name is more famous than he is and probably bakes better quiche than either of us.