B3227

I am 45 years old, male, and unmarried. I live in Birmingham and am currently working as an administrator for a religious studies centre.

Saturday 2nd June: For the last couple of weeks there has been a lot of preparatory Royal coverage on television and radio and in the press, all designed to soften us up for the imminent Jubilee. I didn’t watch any of the television programmes, but I haven’t been able to avoid various articles in the Radio Times and items on news reports. The usual unctuous gush, of course: the Queen is a paragon, a personification of all the virtues; in connection with a programme made up of the Royals’ home movies, a writer for the Radio Times told us that whereas most people shooting their own films can’t hold the camera straight, the Queen’s efforts were marked by a remarkable steadiness. The nadir came in a supposedly rare interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams: the usual list of marvellous qualities, and then he said in that awful rabbity voice, ‘And she’s also a person who is willing to tease and to be teased,’ which conjured up a horrible image of them patting each other on the knee and giggling coquettishly. I am conscious, when the opportunity arises, of ‘pumping’ people on their attitudes to the Jubilee. I had my hair cut yesterday, and raised the topic with the hairdresser, a woman in her mid fifties. I said I hadn’t noticed much in the way of flags and bunting on people’s houses. She told me that they were selling off the union jacks in Asda (six for a pound): ‘They’ll be no use to them after the weekend.’ She thought it was wrong to spend so much in a time of economic hardship – not forgetting the approaching Olympics. Then she said, ‘What about the soldiers coming home without limbs? They’re fighting for her. Who’s looking after them?’ I groaned inwardly, remembering that this was one of her hobby horses, and changed the subject. Walking to work last week, I noticed that only a few shops had Jubilee displays, and these all seemed to be charity shops where perhaps the volunteers are from an older age group and more likely to be pro-monarchy (I know this is a generalization). Or perhaps because these shops are not part of a chain, the assistants have more freedom to express themselves. There is a group of houses and flats for the elderly opposite the hairdressers, and they were the only homes I noticed with much in the way of Jubilee decoration. When I switched on the Today programme on Saturday morning, one upbeat Royal story followed another. Waves of propaganda were coming at me, and I felt for a moment as though I were living in a totalitarian regime like Communist Russia or China. I thought, I can’t listen to this all day and turned over to Radio 2. A British aid worker kidnapped in Afghanistan has been freed by special forces; of course David Cameron is milking this for all its worth, and Number Ten has been drip-feeding fresh aspects of the situation as well as Cameron’s manly role in it throughout the day. I can’t help thinking it’s rather a coincidence that he should have authorized this action on the eve of Jubilee. I read David Copperfield on the train back to S. to visit my mother. A pub outside the station had a huge flag of St. George hanging from an upper storey, but I imagine that this had more to do with the England vs. Belgium football match than the Jubilee. A number of pubs had bunting up. Decorations seemed more popular here. In my mother’s street, I would say about a sixth of the houses had some kind of display (but not my mother’s). We spent the afternoon chatting; later we watched Escape to the Country, and after tea my latest rental from Lovefilm, Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film La Belle et La Bete, which we both really enjoyed. Sunday 3rd June: I got up about 9:30, and thought about getting The Observer and looking at the front pages of the other newspapers for Jubilee reaction so far, but it was raining so I didn’t bother. Several times throughout the morning, the radio news reported that a number of Dunkirk boats would be involved in the river pageant. My mother, exasperated, finally cried, ‘Let it go! Honestly.’ Later, Downing Street let it be known that they had received nine and a half thousand applications for street parties. Hmm. On the day the street parties are being held, it is very late to still be talking in terms of applications; by which I take it that the number of parties actually happening are much lower than the number of applications, and that the Government is attempting to disguise this for reasons of propaganda. In fact a keynote of the coverage so far seems to be the discrepancy between the universal popularity of the Queen and the celebrations as reported and the the visual and other evidence to the contrary. In the afternoon, we taped the pageant and played Scrabble. At the end of tea, my brother phoned. He and his partner M. had been back to the Kent village they have recently moved away from. There was a picnic on the green; then they went to the house of friends to watch the pageant. Was it interesting? I asked; but they had been talking most of the time, and he couldn’t honestly say. M. is strongly pro-Royal (I once had an argument with him about Prince Charles, stemming from a packet of lemon Duchy of Cornwall biscuits I had bought and of which he was wolfing down more than his fair share), and my brother has now absorbed his views like blotting paper; so that he becomes po-faced if Mum or I criticize the Royals. Tomorrow the residents’ association of the town they have moved to are holding a street party, followed by the lighting of a beacon on a nearby hill. Afterwards we had about two hours (before the start of Desperate Housewives) to get through four and a half hours of pageant coverage, so much of it was on fast-forward. To my eyes, boats progressing down a river are intrinsically dull. At least with coach and horses coming down the Mall, you get to see people’s faces properly, and that is always more interesting. The one worthwhile fact I learnt was that the Thames used to be twice as wide and much shallower in central London. I looked at Kate Middleton as was smiling and waving minimally in what amounted to a pen, and thought that it was no life for a young person. The weather became progressively worse and in the end it was bucketing down with rain. However, if we were told once that it wasn’t dampening anyone’s spirits we were told it a hundred times. That British stoicism in the face of terrible weather – which sometimes I find admirable, sometimes irritating – was in full effect. The coverage cut out as the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and a chamber choir of young people (I think from one of the London music colleges) were performing Rule Britannia, Land of Hope and Glory, etc. The orchestra was under cover, the choir on deck, looking like drowned rats and with malfunctioning mics. I wonder whether the Queen actually enjoyed it; or whether she was just glad to get home, put her feet up and have a cup of tea. It was so cold, I took a hot water bottle to bed; goodness knows what it was like on the Thames. Monday 4th June: On the radio news this morning, there was a sound bite from the Queen’s ex- personal or private secretary; he was asked which acts she was most looking forward to at the tribute concert. Shirley Bassey, and others with whom she had been familiar throughout her reign, was the answer. JLS not so much, although the secretary pointed out that she was familiar with all types of performance from her tours of the Commonwealth (which made them sound like a Zulu tribe doing a war dance); and that if others enjoyed themselves, the Queen was happy. We went out for a walk after lunch, and coming back we heard that Prince Phillip had been taken into hospital with a bladder infection. All that standing round in the cold and wet yesterday can’t have done a man of 90 much good. We wondered what would happen if he died before the end of the Jubilee weekend, and concluded that the Queen would just carry on, and that they would delay the announcement until Wednesday at the earliest. Considering she made William and Harry go to church the morning they found out their mother was dead, she wouldn’t have any other option. After tea, we played Scrabble whilst the Jubilee concert was on television in the corner of the room. It was far more enjoyable than I expected, and if Gary Barlow (as the organizer) doesn’t get some kind of recognition in the next birthday honours, I’ll be very surprised. Some of the acts were much better than I expected (Jessie J); some were much worse (Annie Lennox’s singing was all over the shop, which reminded me of how ropey I’d thought her at the Golden Jubilee concert ten years ago). Some performers’ voices have gone a bit (Shirley Bassey, Paul MacCartney), but it didn’t matter because the audience held them in such affection and had such a history with them. Grace Jones was bizarre (hula hooping as she sang Slave to the Rhythm); Cliff Richard should have stopped capering madly to prove how young he was and concentrated on hitting some of the notes; Cheryl Cole looked tiny, frightened and uncharismatic as she always does when called upon to perform live. Kylie Minogue proved herself a real old-fashioned trouper. Elton John was a bit ragged (but he has just come out of hospital). Tom Jones’s voice was as strong as ever. Opera singer Alfie Boe was an embarrassment when he tried to rock out. My favourite part was when Rolf Harris, called upon to fill in during a technical difficulty, sang Two Little Boys a capella. The Queen didn’t arrive until about an hour in – just after Tom Jones had finished singing; which, if I was Tom Jones, I would have been quite annoyed about. She did the same at the Golden Jubilee concert (and, it was rumoured afterwards, wore earplugs throughout). Tuesday 5th June: I came back to Birmingham on the train this morning. Zoe Ball on Radio 2 was playing Two Little Boys. I found it unexpectedly moving, and judging by her reaction and that of several callers, so did others. If this song is available for download, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it entering the charts next Sunday. Later I heard a little of Jeremy Vine’s lunchtime phone-in. The first item concerned the Jubilee weekend’s incontrovertible success; and as he and his guests chuntered on in a triumphalist manner, I saw how opinion and personal conviction (what people wish had happened) can be made to stand in for, if not reality, at least a recognition of the complexity and multiplicity of reactions to an historical event. Future historians beware! A political commentator from the Daily Telegraph (who might almost have been a spoof character dreamt up by a satirist) said that although twenty years ago, a republican movement was gathering strength in this country (apparently whipped up in its entirety by the Murdoch press, now vanquished by the phone-hacking scandal), the public have lately come to see the benefits of the monarchy. ‘Good will out,’ he actually said. I have the sense almost of a slight edge of hysteria or panic in the right wing media’s representation of the celebrations as an incomparable triumph. People seem to want to believe in something inhuman (Cameron stating that the Queen had not put a foot wrong in sixty years is one example amongst many, many others). For the rest of the day, I went to the supermarket, read David Copperfield and looked on the internet. At half past nine, I watched half an hour of the BBC News Channel for an overview of the four days of Jubilee: about the only thing I hadn’t seen before was Katharine Jenkins at Epsom Races on Friday, inaudibly singing either God Save the Queen or Land of Hope and Glory, stood in the middle of what looked like a muddy field and looking ridiculous in a strapless silver evening gown. After that I watched a programme on Channel 4 where the artist Grayson Perry visited Sunderland with a view to collecting material on working class life to inspire him in designing a pair of tapestries