The Royal Overkill

At the time of writing this, it is exactly 22 hours before apparently a third of the entire human population sits down, shuts up, and simultaneously stares at the magic picture-generating rectangle in the corner of the room (or the ceiling if you're one of those people from flatscreen adverts who lie in bed without the ability to crane their necks slightly upwards). Nobody's actually aware of it, what with all this hush-hush over one of the biggest TV events of, like, you know, ever... that is, of course, in any country that isn't Britain. In Britain, however, the results of a solid month of the Royal Overkill are about to come to fruition. Let's face it, anyone who hasn't heard of tomorrow's matrimonial ceremony is either (a) dead, (b) dead, or (c) comatose on the brink of death.

It's gotten to the point that people in the hypothetical realm of Facebook have taken to their blue-text abusing, third-party "like" sites to express how little they care about the latest member of the monarchy to sign his life away 'til death. Then again, the kind of people who really get into the obscene amount of random "likes" pretty much reaffirm my view of them as an en masse flock of idiots who read something as banal as "liek dis if you wake up and look at your alarm clock and go OMG cant be botherd today, FML FML FML" and instantly think to themselves 'ohmigod, I soooo do that!!!'

(I would like to use these brackets as an opportunity to stress the en masse description of such people as I do know people on Facebook [i.e. pretty much most of them] who do this and I would like to keep friends and not insult anyone's intelligence. Having said that, if any of you are reading this and your intelligence has been insulted, then might I suggest you go make a "dont you just hate it wen you get caled stupid and your rly not" link for other idiots to join you... with those exact spelling mistakes! Oh, and for the unitiated, "FML" is widely regarded as "fuck my life" which may seem a bit extreme considering the overall unimportance of the tiniest niggling issues not remotely having any affect on a person's life in general, but then again, we are dealing with people who can't tell the difference between "your" and "you're", and I mean if that was me I'd probably just stop altogether. [Oh my, those were some long brackets.])

Anyway, it's understandable that people in Britain probably don't give much of a crown jewel about the main event and are probably more excited about the live edition of Don't Tell The Bride later on in the evening. Just as well, chances are it'll be much more hilarious to see a happy couple get wed in a ceremony in the foyer of the Heineken factory in three-and-a-half minutes, where the bride produces enough tears to hold off a hose-pipe ban this summer and the groom swaggers about squinting, unsure if the woman in the big white dress is the same woman he asked to marry him. However, people around the world probably haven't had this kind of overkill, and if they have, they probably love it. Take the Americans, for example. They'll eat up anything regarding the affairs of the Royal Family over on this side of the pond, but then again, they'll generally eat up anything. But we Brits, as a people, manage to suck the living optimism out of anything and everything we can. Let's not forget, this is pretty much one of the biggest planned events in this still very young century; we're practically living through history right now. In the many years to come when people will ask 'where were you when the Royal Wedding happened?' and it'll be looked back upon with fond nostalgia, which I suppose is somewhat better than reminiscing over 'where were you when September 11 happened?' ...unless, of course, you're one of al-Qaeda.

I totally agree that the preparations for tomorrow's hoo-ha have been long drawn out and shoved down our throats so much that people are actually starting to crap out their own tongues, but regardless, we people should actually be looking forward to it with a cautious vague interest. After all, let's suppose, hypothetically, that the Queen, Prince Phillip, Charles, Camilla, William, Harry or your own choice of Royal affiliate falls onto the table with the wedding cake on, catapults it into the head chorister's face, the rest of the choir follow his lead chanting 'Yummy, yummy, yummy, I've got love in my tummy...' down the aisle of Westminster Abbey, David Beckham starts clapping like a seal because he thinks it's a circus and Philip Schofield - in a disastrous scheduling mix-up - thinks he's presenting The Cube and demands to see a 360-degree Matrix-style shot of the wedding cake mid-flight. Just think in all those decades to come people will ask 'where were you at the Royal Fuck-up?'

I suppose everyone is aware of the scale of it though, and that everyone knows that they're ready to witness history in the making, but the build-up really has been too much and unnecessary. I guess, at least, that's what gives people that excuse-by-proxy for not liking something. This event is pretty much going be everyone's guilty pleasure where we say 'oh my God, this is so boring, what else is on' but secretly inside we're all screaming to ourselves 'I wish everyone would shut up so I can watch this!' It's exactly the same sentiment I've had (and therefore automatically assume other people have) with the likes of Masterchef and Eurovision.

The first of these I've mentioned before when I horribly likened Gregg Wallace's visual appearance to that of a baked potato, while I couldn't find anything interesting to say about the other one so just called him "an Australian man". I've now come to realise that they are, in fact, the human embodiments of Dr. Honeydew and Beaker of The Muppets, with Gregg being the baldy bloke with the big glasses and the other one being so dull that the internal censor in my brain automatically blanks out his speech with a high-pitched "mee-mee, muh-muh-mee-mee-mee". Anyway, it's over now, and the American-who-wants-to-be-Japanese bloke won it, so it you've been following it and haven't had the chance to catch up yet, might I introduce a spoiler alert about seven seconds ago. The other so-bad-it's-good guilty pleasure I assume nobody will ever admit to is Eurovision, with which I've become increasingly fascinated by over the years of technological development in the Digital Age (who knew that places like Latvia and Armenia were capable of epic light-shows?) but I'll probably come back to that next month, if I can be bothered. As far as I'm aware, this is the first post of April!

I've pretty much been busy for the last month contending with copious amounts of coursework (apparently this University wants to assess my knowledge before giving me a degree) and having my head royally stuffed with Kate Middleton's wedding planner. However, to make up for lost words, I've decided to grab hold of the idea of the website SomethingEveryDay (which is currently down, but can be found on Facebook here) where people produce... well... something every day. It first caught my attention when my former poetry tutor was made to write poems (quite possibly at gunpoint, but highly unlikely) every day for the whole month of February, and while I don't really check up on the happenings of SomethingEveryDay every day, I'd like to take the idea and at least attempt to make a blog post every day for the whole month of May. That's the plan anyway.

Then afterwards you can complain about my incessant ramblings as much as the wedding preparations.