Jubilee Weekend commentary

Hot on the heels of my new resolution not to get so angry about work because I’m in danger of getting sectioned and people were starting to flatten themselves against walls and avoid suuden movements or eye contact as I walked down the corridor, we get a long weekend! How lovely is that. So did I go down to London to join the crowds in the Mall, waving flags and cheering, did I wander round St James’s Park making conversation and watching the concert on the big screens, did I stand outside Buckingham Palace in the hope that Prince Harry would suddenly find my beauty irresistable and take me out for a cracking night on he champers round the posh bits of London?

Not exactly. I woodstained and assembled two flatpack shoeracks. This took up most of my long weekend with a little break in the middle to go to a friend’s house and stay over there. On the plus side, this means I saw most of the jubilee celebrations on the telly while swearing at the woodstain, wrestling with the flatpack assembly and wincing at the muscle damage I acquired while wrestling the new shoe racks into the car. And my thoughts are thus:

River Pageant – It’s quite remarkable how dull the BBC managed to make 1000 boats travelling down river. Now I will give them the fact that the weather, in typical British fashion, was shit, but really, was it that likely to be brightened up by the application of Fearne Cotton, a presenter who has fewer IQ points that she has fingers and who is fully capable of dumbing down literally any event. Highlights of Fearne’s performance on the day include addressing a war veteran as Jim, when his name wasn’t Jim and by describing another guy’s survival of the bombing of his ship by clinging onto the body of a dead shark as ‘wow, amazing’ in the same tone she used to describe the Jubilee sick bags. More of which later. I genuinely have no idea why she keeps getting wheeled out for live broadcasts, they require concentration and thought, which let’s be honest, aren’t Fearne’s strong points. Throw a sparkly bangle across the road and you’ll lose her as she scampers after it like an eager spaniel. Girl’s as thick as two short planks.

The Concert – I liked the concert. The concert was good. Not too sure why Will.I.Am featured so heavily, like a small  grinning gnome in fancy dress, since he’s American and as far as I’m aware, America hasn’t been part of Britain’s commonwealth for quite some time. As is Stevie Wonder but then at least Stevie Wonder has some musical talent, unlike our own Cheryl Cole who succesfully managed to prove that talent doesn’t necessarily follow beauty and sometimes miming to a track that’s been fed through the autotune machine isn’t a bad thing. Cliff Richards looked most intriguing, like a stretched marshmallow balanced on top of two pastel coloured pipecleaners and Elton John seemed to have a brand new chihuahua stapled to the top of his head. Outstanding. Rolf Harris did supremely well not to slap Lenny Henry right off the stage after the ignorant git interrupted his song to get Stevie Wonder on. Listen Lenny, it’s ROLF HARRIS, which may not mean much to you but my generation grew up with Rolf, you ask anyone my age ‘d’you know what it is yet?’ and they’ll have flashbacks to Rolf’s Cartoon Time. You. Do. Not. Kick. Rolf. Off. Stage. EVER! Got that Henry?? Rolf was kindly filling in because Stevie Wonder was late, it wouldn’t have killed him to wait another minute till everyone’s favourite Aussie doodler was done. Show some respect.  And another thing, it wasn’t really the time to air your working class black lad shoulder chip. This wasn’t about you and your gripes, it was a concert.

Rolf Harris – legend. As opposed to Lenny Henry – bellend.

 Annie Lennox was as usual dressed in something weird and magnificently in tune, Paul McCartney was as usual dressed like he was still in the Beatles and mediocre. All in all, liked the concert and if Gary Barlow doesn’t have a knighthood before he’s 50 I’ll streak down Deansgate in nothing but carpet slippers.

Church thingy and various other bits and bats yesterday – What I particularly liked about the church service was that Prince Harry, Kate and Prince William were quite clearly hungover. Wills and Kate tried to hide it, Harry slumped in his seat like only a Big Mac and a pint of Sprite would save his life. Magnificent. This is what we want to see from Royals, a stinking hangover, as per royal tradition of hundreds of years.

Royally fucked – we’ve all had moments like this. Not usually in front of tens of millions of people mind you

 I didn’t really listen to the sermon because I’m not religious and I was having some difficulty with the assembly of my shoe racks at this point but I’m sure it was lovely, mostly because I like Rowan Williams, he’s delightfully beardy, looks like he doesn’t give a fuck which direction his hair goes in or what his clothes are doing and says the first things that pop into his very brainy head. This seems to get him into trouble but it is mighty amusing and so I like him. The rest of the stuff from yesterday wasn’t that interesting and was marred once again by a liberal application of the moron Cotton, who this time was with weirdy songstress Paloma Faith, a woman who started by plugging her album and then moved on to discussing the jubilee sick bag. Which apparently comes in two colours and according to the insightful Cotton, whose commentary on the affairs of the day never fail to impress, you can eat too much and then pick which colour you want to throw up in. Every utterance is a gem, truly.

Someone just cranked the level of stupid in the room up to ‘maximum’.

So, a lovely jubilee weekend, two shoe racks fully stained and assembled, only one hangover over the whole period and one personal injury. I count that as a raging success. When’s the next one?