Colours nailed to the mast on the royals

Useful royals

I'm just listening to King Sunny Ade. That's the sort of royalty to admire. There's been no end of Kings of Rock 'n' Roll. There's Prince Buster, and just Prince.

So. Not all royals are freeloading anachronisms.

I don't know what our lot would produce, musically. They probably slap their lederhosen in time to 'God Save the Queen' (and not the proper sex Pistols' version), played on the bladder pipes, backed by the bierkeller brass ensemble, while Phil the Greek smashes some plates and Zorba-dances in the background.

Why can't we sack them off (they're only there on he strength of who their mums and dads are – that's patently absurd and not meritocracy thinking) have a revolution and instate Suggsy as King and Bjork as Queen?

Among other titles there's Da Boss, the Godfather of Soul, and in the officer's mess there's Captain Sensible and Sargent Pepper, and Commander Cody, and the Lost Planet Airmen (there's Google if you don't believe me).

We've tried all manner of personnel running things. The educationally sub-normal heading up the schools, we routinely have people who've never crawled around a stranger's house unable to see their hand in front of their face at three in the morning with their arse alight make decisions about our fire services, and without a scrap of success to boast about. Why not give musicians a go?

Just when you start letting up on them...

...one of the royals remind you just why they have to go. Last in line was the one with the face like a horse, who pitches up to the rugby, at least, spouting off about 'humane' gassing of badgers. Like she's some sort of leading world expert in bovine TB.

Humane would be to let them alone. Humane would be to preserve their habitat. That would be humane.

We are just mammals. As a species, we've developed the capacity for thought and reflection. Unfortunately we've then developed the conviction, among a sizeable proportion of the population, that we're something special.

Apparently, were insects to disappear, the world as we know it would cease to exist, unable to recover from the impact on the ecosystems. Were we to disappear, no-one would notice a thing. Well, maybe the badgers would celebrate the extinction of the genus that included Owen Paterson and a princess who wanted to gas them. And maybe the whales would celebrate the end of the whaling industry, the rhinos would appreciate no longer getting slaughtered for their horns, the dolphins (and the tuna) would love the end of the tuna nets...and so on. I don't think, if they did notice our passing, any other of the world's species would do much in the way of mourning.

Ultimately, the system's absurd. Utterly and totally. Would you have a brain surgeon's son operate on you, just because his father's a brain surgeon? He's twelve years old / he's a graphic artist / he has shaking hands and suffers from near-terminal clumsiness. That's what you buy into supporting a royal family. It seems like some special madness to me.

Were gassing badgers to death to be humane, then so were Auschwitz and Belsen and the rest.

We're paying this woman a fortune a year and she wants to gas badgers. I won't be singing that national anthem anytime soon, matey.