The oil and the spoon

It's absurd and Charles probably knows it

Around the corner from us one single house is now decorated with union flags. In the main window is a montage of Charles pictures from his youth to his neo-old age. And there is an irony here. The occupant of the house is a well-known columnist for a mid-market tabloid whose guns – before they took permanent sighting on Harry and Meghan – were often trained on Charles. Trained and fired. To my neighbour he has variously been the “Prince of Hypocrisy” and the “Prince of Petulance’. Until he wasn’t.

So, the irony? No flags have gone up on our house, but I probably agree with Charles in his views about things like multiculturalism and climate change far more than my neighbour does. Indeed I would say that Charles is actually a pretty good representative of where modern Britain is, whereas my neighbour is living in a parallel reality where people yearn for the 1950s.

So it’s funny to be disapproved of by people - who themselves disapprove of the King - for being insufficiently respectful of the fol-di-rol  which will take place this weekend. Those of us who find the idea of “holy oil” just a bit silly in the era of drone warfare and artificial intelligence, are (according to several columnists on various newspapers) insufficiently aware of the true value of such ancient custom. Once again, as over Brexit, we don’t understand the metaphysical value of the nation state and its medieval traditions.

Mr Godfrey and the facts of life

Being lectured on not taking an obvious absurdity seriously enough reminds me of those moments from my schooldays when institutional pomposity became impossibly funny. In my first secondary school - an all-boys North London comprehensive where no quarter was given or expected - our sex instruction was entrusted to the chemistry teacher, Mr Godfrey. 35 13-year olds, many of whom had already received rudimentary and often inaccurate information from their elder brothers, sat while he pointed to line diagrams on the blackboard – fallopian tubes looking like weird plants and something called a vas deferens whose purpose was entirely unclear. And then, when he decided he needed to be a little more demotic (“the testis, though you probably call them your balls”), the class fell about. Not because of what he was saying, but the way he was saying it. So Mr Godfrey decided that he needed to remind us of the seriousness of the subject. “Sex”, he said indignantly, “is not something to laugh about. It is something my wife and I regard as being good and sacred!”  As you might expect, the rhetorical appearance of Mr Godfrey’s invisible wife did not help.