Do we still have republicans in this country? Proper ones, I mean. Ones who care. I suppose we must, but I can’t imagine where you’d have to go to find them. They probably hold meetings in suburban church halls, rented on timeshare with other dimly remembered groups such as Mosleyites, and Flat-Earthers, and people still furious that the Jacobites got such a raw deal. Odd how republicanism isn’t even an esoteric political position in Britain these days. It’s barely even a political position at all.
Not so in Quebec. There, this week, 100 anti-monarchy protesters clashed with riot police when the Prince of Wales tried to visit a regimental hall. Imagine that. Imagine being that cross with Prince Charles. Not global capitalism, not the Afghanistan war, but him with the ears, who makes those biscuits.
I don’t really know where I am with the French Canadians, to be honest. Obviously one can only have the greatest of admiration for any group of people whose major cultural export throughout 300 years of history has been C?line Dion: The Essential Collection (disc one — disc two is kind of patchy) but still, I couldn’t pretend I know what makes them tick. I can understand, I suppose, how they might, on balance, reckon it’s a bit silly for them and us to still have the same monarch. But to actually riot about it? Baby, as C?line might say, this is getting serious.
When the Queen made her first visit there as long ago as 1964, I gather that things were much the same. Baton charges, and everything.
Oh Quebec. Once more, you open the door? “The Prince is important as a symbol of power given by the blood,” said one demonstrator, this time. “More than 80 per cent of the population in Quebec is opposed to the monarchy.” No they aren’t. They just think they are. There’s nothing there to be opposed to. It’s like being opposed to cottage cheese, or curtains.
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That’s been the great achievement of the Royal Family — to become about as political as Paddington Bear. That’s why we don’t really have republicans of our own.
Look, Quebecers. Be separatists all you like. I couldn’t really give a monkey’s. Nobody could, in the whole world, except for you. But please, don’t riot at our royals. Even if they are your royals too. Blaming them for your constitution is like blaming hats for Ascot. Quebec is not oppressed by Prince Charles. Nobody is oppressed by Prince Charles, save for the odd millionaire architect, and anybody who finds themselves curiously addicted to his delicious but frankly overpriced Duchy Originals chocolate gingers. Blaming him just makes you look stupid.
Near, far, wherever you are. Think twice.
X-cruciating Factor
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The X Factor. Somebody has to say something before it ends. What is wrong with you all? It’s the sort of thing they must have had on telly in East Germany before the wall came down. It takes great and beautiful pop songs and makes them all sound exactly the same. It’s stage-school kids singing karaoke. Why is this an OK thing to watch?
I’m not anti reality TV. I’m pro it. I loved Big Brother. I even loved Touch the Truck. Remember that? It aired in 2001. Twenty people, standing in a shopping centre for a week, touching a truck. The last one to remain awake got to drive it home, probably after a nap. That, to me, was the genre in its purest form. But The X Factor? That’s reality TV for people who aren’t prepared to put the hours in. It’s designed to be talked over. It’s television for people who don’t have the attention span for Big Brother, and don’t have the attention span for a proper conversation either.
And yet I keep meeting clever, sane, otherwise admirable people who claim to love it. I’m doing my best. Every Saturday night I turn it on for five minutes, to try to understand. And I don’t. It terrifies me.
It makes me feel as though the world is full of people who have never heard a pop song before, or watched a television programme. It makes me feel as though I am losing my mind, as though I’ve walked out into the street and the sky is maroon, and there are caribou flying past, instead of birds. All I want is for it to stop. And I don’t think it ever will.
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Silicon value
While I do think one has to be slightly perturbed at the notion of future A-level English exams being marked by computer, I must say I’m rather impressed by that computer’s eye for prose. Bravo, soulless Hal, for having the silicon guts to point out that Ernest Hemingway wrote like a lazy drunk, and that Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange is, on first reading, about as comprehensible as a speech by John Prescott.
Mind you, computers don’t much like my writing, either. When I write in Microsoft Word, every second sentence is underlined in green. “Fragment (consider revising),” says the programme, sniffily. But surely this ought to apply to other short, abbreviated sentences, too. Such as, for example, “fragment (consider revising)”. And yet Word seems unperturbed. Double standards.