The Royal Toilet Wedding.

Well it’s 29^th April, that fateful date when I really must renew my tax disc on line. It’s 7.30am and I scan the sports channels for MotoGP and find the Royal Wedding. BBC coverage has already started! A weather woman is predicting there will be the possibility of sunshine or cloud and that if it’s not dry it’ll be raining. Now maybe it’s just me but UK weather women should not have big tits. OK for Berlusconi’s Italy but not here. So this woman, with her bumper pair, a smile verging on insanity and confident prediction that anything could happen except perhaps a tornado, outside Buckingham Palace is a climatic calamity to start with. Her banter with her male presenter resembles two over excited preschoolers moments before they have a joint toilet accident. It seems all the excitement is just too much for a disposable nappy to contain. So they go over to a reporter at a street party at a holiday camp in Lowestoft or somewhere to presumably avoid showing grown men and women peeing their pants with euphoria on national TV. But this guy is little more than a demented chimpanzee as well. Between rows of windswept caravans in Norfolk are two rows of trestle tables (def: a table supported by trestles. So what the hell is a trestle?!) decked out with paper plates, red, white and blue cakes and an assortment of grannies waving flags. This must surely be an end of the war re-enactment society. But no, these too are off their tits with happiness and will be racing to the toilet as soon as the cameras are off. It’s likely, given all this glee-ing and peeing, that one unforeseen consequence of this wedding will be a water shortage. Now I’m all for royalty coming down a peg and joining the vacuous upper class and for national celebrations like ‘Punch a Cleric Day’ but I’m worried about our media coverage. Their constant need to ramp up our euphoria has gone way past credibility and is now heading for derangement. Soon we’ll be shitting in the street just to show how ecstatic we are for hosting the Olympic Games or our grief for our loss of the queen when Charles finally gets his wish.

Alexandra’s Horses.

We’ve just spent the afternoon with Alexandra’s six gypsy cob horses, all mares and un-ridden. They’re like free range spending their days in their field eating grass and doing what takes their fancy; one chocolate brown, the others brown or black and white, with long uncut mains and tails. They’re friendly and gentle; but then how to say the rest? Imagine you have forgotten thoughts, how to have them. Imagine the mechanisms of thought and all the talk and anxieties and perplexities that stem from them have become lost to you. You become in the hands of something deeper, a virile un-muted responsiveness, the essence of being. This is what the horses have and will share should you wish to. But it’s not easy to lose thought, it permeates the flawed godliness of our human existence, it brings primal uneasiness, a vacuum so eager to be filled. Yet should you with some effort of will maintain this vacuous-ness you will find yourself being with the horses, being with being. This is how they are and they will teach you. The effect is sublime. Not the crass ‘sublime’ of something being really, really nice but the sublime of transcendence into a purer state of being. Think back to the time some mutated gene lost our hair, left us bald victims of heat and cold, striving to stay alive by problem solving. It set our compass a million years ago that has stayed and grown into this thoughtful awful complexity. But the horses taught me our previous state, being with being, hunter with pray, player with play.

Keep the Koran Safe.

So a Koran was burnt and seven people were murdered and two beheaded after a protest call by an Islamic cleric. And I thought the Catholics were strict. How terrible a sin it must be to burn one copy of a book you can buy on Amazon for £4.47 (£0.71 Kindle edition) That’s less than 70p a life. I mean what if you bought one and didn’t like it and threw it in the trash? There must be millions out there and a lot chewed up by cows or dropped in the canal or something. What if the bookshop wrapped one up by mistake and you got home and it wasn’t The History of the BSA, it was a Koran. You’d be saddled with it for the rest of your life knowing if anything happened to it you’d be responsible for the multiple deaths of non Muslims. And if your house caught fire you’d have to rush back in, past the kids to save the Koran you bought in a charity shop to see what all the fuss was about with Salman Rushdie. But how can we save people from committing this terrible, terrible sin? I have an idea. What if we gathered up all the Korans in the world and placed them in a very safe place, a concrete bunker with thick steel doors and locked them away for a thousand years; that would do it. It’s a small price to pay to avoid all that murder and beheading in the name of Allah. I think Allah would like that, it would appeal to his sense of irony.