Fox (n): carnivore of genus vulpes; crafty person; scavenger; (vb) to confuse; -ed (adj): to be drunk.
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Wednesday 13 April 2011

Royal Wedding: the bland marrying the blah.

KATE Middleton's lovely hair. Kate's lovely smile. Kate's worrying weight loss. Her clothes, her make-up, her choice of tights, those ever-present knee-high boots.

Everything written about this 29-year-old is the kind of unquestioningly fawning PR which Nick Clegg would kill for, yet despite being hit over the head every single day with tales of how lovely Kate Middleton is I don't know a single person who gives a flying goddamn about her or her £20m 'austerity' wedding.

That's not to say we don't like Kate, or Catherine as she prefers to be known (annoyingly for the tabloids, as we prefer names short and sweet). She seems very nice, very pretty, very sensible. There is nothing that can be disliked. But at the same time it seems not many of us have fallen in love with love in quite the same way we did when Dear Old Di married Charles.

Prime Minister Dishface has urged us to party like it's 1661 but there are only 5,000 street celebrations planned, mainly in the richer parts of the country where they don't mind buying vol-au-vents for the neighbours. A group of impish republicans who applied for a party of their own in Camden were banned by the local council, whose members obviously understand neither democracy or satire.

We'll all tune in and watch, of course, but this time we'll be bitching about William's hairline and whatever Camilla's got on her head, not oohing over the dress or thinking how sweet it is when they kiss on the balcony. Instead it'll be "does she look bulimic to you?" and "they're only kissing because they have to". It's the bland marrying the blah.

William and Kate, however nice and in love they may be, are just dull. The stag do was dull. Their wedding, to which the Royal Family are going to be ferried in a fleet of minibuses like the cast of Shameless going to Ramsgate, will be dull. The dress will be boring and the kiss will be boring and we will probably never get to read stories about Princess Catherine's affair with a rugby player or Prince William telling an old girlfriend he wants to be her tampon.

And I for one will miss that. The Royal Family, whether you like it or not, is just a richer version of all our families; dysfunctional, fascinating, with a slightly racist grandad. The only reason it's still with us is because it's a soap opera and we decided in 1660 that it was more interesting having them around.

Maybe we're not getting excited about the wedding because as a nation we've lost our innocence, or maybe it's because, like a once-burned divorcee, the idea of another marriage leaves us cynically wondering how long this one's going to last.

Or perhaps it's more to do with the fundamental fact that this is a union between a millionaire's workshy daughter who dresses like a 40-year-old and a soon-to-be-unemployed hooray who looks like a slightly dense carthorse with a bald spot.