the solitary review

… we’re all going to go down the pub and get ratted. That’s what you do at a wake, isn’t it?

Actually tbh I barely drink alcohol these days. Nothing terrible, I just got fed up with feeling like shit in the mornings. But what I mean is that the last ten days have been, to once more quote Andrew Lloyd Webber, ‘mourning all day and mourning all night.’ Yes, Queen Elizabeth II was like the nation’s granny, and a lot of the shock is that now we have a King who is quite clearly not an elevated being of any kind, people are going to be hard put to see why we should give him any deference just because of who his mother was. And be asking why can’t his son – who does seem to be genuinely popular by default, i.e. he hasn’t actually done anything crass or terrible – be King instead, assuming we have to have one. Charles III or William V, or better still, William V and Catherine the First?

As a Green Party member I should be a republican, and basically am. You don’t even need a functioning monarchy to enjoy its history – Portugal has been a republic for a hundred years and still does well out of its monarchical history, plenty of sites to explore and so on. Meanwhile we have a prime minister who should really be called the sub-prime minister and appears to be some kind of robot Margaret Thatcher. (did Joe Biden really describe her as “Drunk version of Thatcher”? Probably not, a lot of things come from comedy sketches etc. and that may have done). She is also not only uncaring of the natural environment, she actually seems to think destroying it is a good idea. In that, and only in that, would I stand with King Charles, whose views on environmentalism have got him largely pilloried and mocked by the right-wing press. Which would you choose?