NOTES, ESSAYS AND PROVOCATIONS
The Windsors
MY FRIEND ROGER MICHELL DIED ABOUT A YEAR AGO. He was a funny sort of Englishman, both side-splitting and peculiar, and during our lunches we would often talk about how nice it was to have a ruling family so much more dysfunctional than one’s own. I mean, if the Windsors hadn’t existed, British doctors would’ve been forced to invent them: they’re swifter than Xanax and much more of an uplift than Prozac. They’re a miracle cure for aches and pains. Roger was keen on uplift — he directed Notting Hill and The Duke — and the thing he sent me, just before he died, was an assemblage of footage about the Queen, which is set to be a future film. The film showed multiple images of the monarch through the camera lens from her childhood onwards, seen from the public’s point of view.
POV is everything when it comes to the royals. I’m talking about the Windsors here, not what Chips Channon, in his hilariously snobbish diaries, calls “the half-crown royalties”. I’m really talking about the Queen. She’s the interesting one, because she’s so good at it, and because she has a kind of instinct for survival that makes everybody around her look like they’re in a Ray Cooney farce next to her Shakespeare. My general opinion — that they should all be taken to the guillotine tomorrow morning — is somewhat interrupted by the Queen herself, who seems so patently nice and so specifically competent. If it were to be a choice between Her Majesty and some crooked president, the kind of damaged campaigner with pockets full of crumpled tenners, then I’d go for her, despite my reservations about rulers and kingdoms and Commonwealths and all that shite.
But perhaps I’m just soft on her because she knows me. Sure, she forgets, but the Queen first met me when I was nine years old. It was no big deal. I was serving at that time with the Kilwinning Cub Scouts and we were stationed at the Magnum, a leisure centre in the Royal Borough of Irvine where everybody was soon to lose their virginity. We didn’t that day, in 1977, because we were quite young, plus the Queen was there opening the centre, and it would have been rude to start snogging Angela Doogan and going for “top” or “bottom” — that’s how foreplay worked in Ayrshire in the years before the internet — while the lady with the white face and the flowery swimming cap was doing the rounds. I was in the front row and trying to ditch the Duke of Edinburgh, who was asking us about cooking sausages.
I wanted to see Her Maj and work out if she was real. She approached the bench (for judgement comes strong in a pack of nine-year-olds) and smiled like a person on a postage stamp who was quite chuffed with herself.
“She looks like plastic,” said Russell Stirling, to my right.
“No, marshmallow,” o
