Gimps like us: Why the Royal wedding felt so familiar
Beneath the grandeur, this family gone wrong looks a lot like ours.
As if the congregation didn't hold enough adulterers. The groom, standing weak-kneed at the altar, looks around, scans his family for evidence of fidelity ... no, not him, no, no, not him either ... the clan appears beset by an easy amnesia re: marital vows and liable to treat the sanctity of that institution void whenever three bishops and 45 paparazzi aren't present.
Just imagine how the divorcee bride feels with Princess Margaret hissing from the crypt as she is led up the aisle by a father-in-law who left his marriage certificate in the pocket of a suit that fell from fashion after a season. She's carrying a bouquet of forget-me-nots, her deceased mother-in-law's favourite flower. And her mother-in-law will not be forgotten. Not remembered, though, for fidelity.
I was just beginning to wonder if anyone in St George's Chapel took marriage seriously when a bishop minted in the multi-bridal wilds of Utah began to get fervent on the topic of LOVE. But then he went and spoiled it all by bellowing pieties first voiced by Martin Luther King. Now, MLK is a man worth quoting on almost any occasion but a wedding, where the massive spectre of his philandering must heckle and moan above the spoken word.
When the bishop went warp speed from the torpor of his Episcopal blandishments into a popeyed Southern Baptist shtick my immediate thought was that he was trying to ramp this sermon into a full-time gig. Leverage his single-serve global fame into a weekly syndicated hour of blather across the Midwest for those who have unluckily become too obese to attend an actual church and must wallow on their sofas and holler their amens at their flatscreens. Set himself up for life. Why not? People have fed off royal endorsements since capitalism began. He clearly picked the Queen as a sort of atomic-strength Simon Cowell, trapped in her pew, unable to do anything but smile while he shook his theological tail feathers at her to win Episcopal's Got Talent.
We could run through the full smorgasbord of stupefaction in the house, but for my money no one did it better than Zara Tindall for amused contempt. "Really? We finally let you people in, Americans from beyond the beachhead of civilisation that is Boston ... and you repay us by repeatedly name-checking Jesus?"
I've never seen such a happily incredulous woman. Beautifully pregnant with scorn and bairn. She obviously thought the day was going to be a drag, but here she was witnessing every notion and prejudice she's ever had of the hoi polloi confirmed in neon and thunder from the pulpit. The Balm of Gilead my royal arse, Bishop. We might be a family of toe-suckers and wannabe tampons but at least our idiocies are eavesdropped and not freely offered in sermon.
There was uneasiness in the chapel accompanying the crescendo of bemusement. A feeling that this guy might be pulling back the curtain and revealing the con. A sense among the royal congregation that, Hey, we get away with this gig by applying the apologetic wattage of the Church of England. Be careful, Sir. You're spitting in your host's eye talking about making of this old world a new world. Your hosts are a dynasty, after all. And dynasties are generally antagonistic to new worlds.
Looking over the congregation as the pieties wrestled the realities, at the balding men and stout women forgiven their transgressions as the young limbered up to commit their own, I realised I'd been reading the thing wrong. It had looked like a multi-generational morality play, a tableau vivant of a family gone wrong. It had looked like something you could frown upon, tut-tutting deliciously at their claim of holiness set against their history of error and infighting. But then I realised I'd been to a score of weddings the same as this in all but scale. In timid redbrick churches where the air-con hummed above the pastor's plagiarisms. And that this was an allegory. This was us. Every feeble duke interchangeable with an uncle of my own, every thwarted Lady a sister, every coke-addled Etonian a schoolmate I'd necked Cinzano with, Her Maj my Mum.
Here we were laid out large. Given a run in the big room. Here was a moment to survey the spotted heritage and to ... not laugh, but to smile at the fractured doings of the gimp species that limped out of Africa garbed in lion skins and pieties all those years back.