As any writer worth their salt is, I’m always very conscious
of my audience when I write these articles. What is interesting to the people
of Sussex? What do they care about? What do they spend their days doing? Sometimes
it takes me hours of head-banging to bash through the writer’s block and think
of something that I hope you may find vaguely interesting/amusing/surprising
(delete as appropriate). Thankfully, this month there was only one thing I
could really write about and you would had to have been in the deepest darkest
corner of the thickest rainforest in the world to have missed the Jubilee
celebrations.
I’m not the biggest royalist in the country. Don’t
misunderstand me: I’m not anti-royalist
but I don’t honestly give them much thought. I vaguely remember having the royal wedding on the TV in the
background as I cleaned the house and I’ll admit to offering a cursory glance
to the magazine pages covered in images of the Duchess of Cornwall. The
insightful critiques into what she’s wearing and whether she’s too young for
skin-coloured tights are vaguely engaging every now and again.
Despite my apathetic approach to our royal figureheads I
couldn’t help but suffer from a surprisingly overwhelming feeling of national pride as
the Jubilee weekend rattled on. While it wasn’t all down to the image of the
Royal Family in their finery, that was certainly partly responsible. You’d have
to be made of stone to not give massive kudos to an 86-year-old woman who
spends three hours standing in the pouring rain on a boat while the wind blows
about her only to find she still has energy to dance a small jig when the
orchestra offers a rousing nautical piece at the end.
So yes, the Royal Family, and especially the Queen impressed
me this weekend. I left the Jubilee holiday a little more pro-Royalist than I
was when I arrived. Watching Camilla and Kate have a giggle while they compared
how cold their hands were with the boys was nothing short of a heartwarmingly,
natural moment that any family could have enjoyed. It was clearly an event that every royal in attendance was
very proud to be a part of. Even more clearly, they were very proud of their
wife, mother, mother-in-law, grandmother and grandmother-in-law respectively.
And of course, we
were proud of our Queen. So proud in fact that we came out in our hundreds and
thousands to stand in the rain and we weren’t nearly as covered as the
Queen. We didn’t have our own royal barge with a canopy to shield us from the
worst of the weather. Oh no! We resorted to Union Jack umbrellas and anoraks
and wellies in the way that only the British know how.
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We kept on smiling as raindrops poured their way down our
face and neck and into our socks and shoes. Drenched to the bone we lined the
Mall and the Thames and laughed our way through it waving flags and cheering.
For a nation that’s known for moaning and whinging we maintained stoic cheer in
the face of weather that seemed intent on ruining the day. But let’s be honest,
we wouldn’t have enjoyed it nearly as much if it had been sunny. It wouldn’t
have felt like Britain and it wouldn't have given us a chance to show off our
unfathomable ability to have even more fun in the face of adverse weather
conditions.
We are a strange and confused nation; of that there is no
doubt. If it had been gloriously warm, as it was the week before, we would have
complained about the heat. Every single one of us would have suffered mild to
severe sunburn because we simply don’t know how to deal with the sun. We would have drunk ourselves into a
stupor because that seems to be the rules when it’s warm enough to drink
outside. And worst of all, British men would have taken their tops off and you
know what? It’s never the men that you wouldn’t mind seeing with their tops off, it’s always the ones that should
keep their torsos firmly under wraps.
We don’t like picnicking unless we have to dig holes to prop
up five umbrellas and create makeshift waterproofs out of black bin liners. The
beach isn’t nearly as much fun unless you spend half your time chasing beach
balls as the British wind blows them away and on the same theme, sandwiches
aren’t as tasty unless the aforementioned wind has blown a decent dose of sand
into them – it’s worth noting that we are the only nation that insists on eating on the beach. Bank holiday
weekends are always, without fail, preceded by a week of beautiful,
sun-drenched weather that will inevitably break as we all leave work for the
long weekend. We enjoy forging out fragments of fun despite the fact that the
British environment never seems to play along.
And that’s not all. Us Brits as a nation have a variety of
weird and wonderful traits that other nations find dumbfounding. For example,
our national love of a queue is discussed the world over. We are the only
nation in the world that will actively and happily wait in an ordered and
measured queue without wondering why we’re doing it. While this is part of our
British genteelism it doesn’t stand us in good stead when we travel to faraway lands.
A friend of mine recently got back from China. It was only while she tried to
queue for food that she realised her British upbringing had left her ill equipped
for the regular wrestle that other nations revert to instead of a queue.
If you come from a country that isn’t part of the
Commonwealth, cricket will be a complete mystery to you, as will cucumber
sandwiches. It will make no sense that a roast dinner can only be eaten on a
Sunday and there’s no reason for this, it just simply is. You’ll also, quite rightly, wonder at our need to sit and eat
outside when the sun shows its pretty little face, even though it’s still only
14 degrees and we’re all shivering because we’re wearing shorts, t-shirts and
flip-flops when we should be rugged up and inside watching Coronation Street or
Eastenders. Oh, and while we’re talking about those shows, only the British can
make long-running entertainment out of the most depressing storylines set in
the two most poverty-stricken, fictional areas of England! Afternoon tea is an
indulgence that only we can justify and don’t even get people started on fish
and chips.
Please don’t make the mistake of taking this as criticism. It’s the complete opposite. This is a celebration of all that is British and all that the Jubilee weekend stood for. As a nation we talk a lot of grumpy rubbish and rabbit on about how lousy our country is, how useless the Royal Family are, how boring the endless rain is and how we wish we lived somewhere else but it’s all a big fat lie. The weekend showed how, in reality, we can’t help but be proud of our nation in all its rainy, windy, crickety, sandy-sandwiched, topless and hairy gloriousness.
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