0409blog

Your Majesty

I have always felt an abiding almost religious kinship with the royal family and that is why I am so deeply, intensely, personally and tragically saddened with the death of the eternally stuffy Prince Philip, the 99-year-old Duke of Edinburgh, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, father of Prince Charles and patriarch of a royal family that is the mother of all anachronisms and has been gradually but consistently unraveling to the point of total irrelevance and little more than the butt of a bad joke.

I also feel an abiding kinship with the planet Neptune and the late prince is about as relevant to me as that distant planet of which we know next to nothing about. Never, not even once, did I proclaim like Philip proclaimed to Elizabeth, “I, Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, do become your liege man of life and limb and of earthly worship … so help me God.” I don’t even know what a “liege” is but it sounds very lame.

The prince and I share the same names and we are both human, to a degree, but that’s pretty much where any similarities end. He lived in a castle or two, I live in a split-level. His thousand acre homestead is carefully manicured with not a blade of grass out of place while I push my lawnmower because I couldn’t afford the self-propelled kind and if I had to cut the thousand acres I would be so busy that I couldn’t do anything else.

I wear tattered jeans, the prince has been known to be wrapped in ermine. I wear baseball caps, he dons coronets. My hair is black and white, his was blonde; I am 5-feet-7 with green eyes, he was 6-feet-1 with piercing blue eyes; and I wouldn’t know a polo game from a cricket match or hurling while carriage driving and flying were not exactly in my economic orbit.

Do I sound jealous? Well, of course I am jealous. Who wouldn’t want to be hailed as royalty, adored by the public like so many subjects and be the latest representative of a blood line that has persevered through more than a thousand years, beginning around 886 when Alfred the Great named himself King of the Anglo-Saxons, starting an unbroken line of rule. I am not even the king of my castle, as I am constantly reminded, so yes it would feel very good to actually be the king and to behead any who deny me or disagree with me or just look at me the wrong way.

I would very much like to consider myself descended from a different form of human than the rest of humanity. I would love to have people worship me and have them follow all the royal rules of engagement, including never, never to turn their back on me upon leaving my presence. And royalty often sits in thrones which are set above those who might come to praise, which is also a position I crave and have never gotten anywhere near to, ever.

Now, castles seem very cool, actually very cold, as I would think those thousand year old stone walls don’t hold the heat very well. But then again, cost is no concern of royalty and they can easily afford a good heating system. There are very likely dozens of servants at the royalty’s beck and call for everything from shining the royal shoes to fetching the royal dog and they always address you as “Yes, your majesty, what may I do for you?” and I could just snap my fingers and demand my breakfast be brought to me post haste and then toss the eggs on the floor in disgust because they are too runny and tell the servant to go back and get it right this time or risk being flogged.

My clothes are pretty boring, basically I wear the same blue jeans and flannel shirt every day, changing when they have become too filthy even for me to wear. But Ermine, now that is a piece of apparel fit for a king or queen or prince.

Would I like to parade around my castle and my kingdom as if my feet never touch the ground while I harrumph a lot and avoid any show of emotion and never, ever laugh? Yes, I could do that.

Forget about going to work. Nobody tells royalty what to do or when to do it because royalty reports to no one. Imagine that. I fight tooth and nail every day to do as little as possible around my home but as royalty I could just do nothing and that would be the last of it. I am exaggerating because even royalty has responsibilities, like being a figurehead of national pride and a symbol of unity and tradition and I could do that with my eyes closed. The king or queen is the technical head of state but the parliament and the prime minister do the heavy lifting although there is the occasional symbolic meeting with visiting heads of state who bow and then go about the real business of meeting with the prime minister.

The king or queen opens each session of Parliament, and that is a weighty matter that hardly takes any effort. The monarch is also responsible for assenting legislation that has been passed by parliament. Assenting means looking at a piece of paper and saying “I assent,” with not a bead of sweat worked up in the process.

And when I died, there would be condolences from world leaders and all the pomp of a royal funeral and people would be riveted to their TV screens to see the reactions of the surviving, grief-stricken members of the royal family. And I would be buried with all my regalia of no less than 23 absurdly garish-looking medals starting with the 1939–1945 Star, a British Commonwealth campaign medal, awarded for service during the Second World War and ending with the Commemorative medal of the 2500th Anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire, awarded in 1971 by the Imperial State of Iran, among assorted other medals.

I once won second place in a batting contest at the Ted Williams Baseball Camp and at my demise, I have already made it clear that I want no TV cameras and to sharply limit any publicity. And I want to be buried in my Boy Scout uniform with the Star award and clutching my Ted Williams Baseball camp trophy.

Maybe the British aren’t as weird as they seem and maybe, just maybe they have something with this “steeped in tradition” thing. Maybe I’m just jealous and maybe there is something to tradition that has utterly nothing to do with life today but reminds people of a far less complicated time when rules were rules were rules just because they have always been rules and there would be no deviations and you better not turn your back on the queen when you leave her presence.