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Who or what do you blame for the nations general apathy towards the Royal wedding?
- Thread starter magoo
- Start date
sten_super
Brain Surgeon
I think there's a lot of interest in it. I know a lot of people who are intending to watch it or at least 'have it on in the background'.
Having said that, it doesn't interest me, because I'm not particularly interested in the lives of other people that I don't know and feel no particular bond with. I don't think it's got anything to do with a lack of national identity or anything like that, I just don't get the fuss. The Queen may be the head of state but in no more than a ceremonial way; I've no interest in CMD's personal life, nor that of any of his predecessors, why should I care any more about a member of the royal family?
Having said that, it doesn't interest me, because I'm not particularly interested in the lives of other people that I don't know and feel no particular bond with. I don't think it's got anything to do with a lack of national identity or anything like that, I just don't get the fuss. The Queen may be the head of state but in no more than a ceremonial way; I've no interest in CMD's personal life, nor that of any of his predecessors, why should I care any more about a member of the royal family?
brighton and hove forest
New member
- Aug 8, 2010
- 39
Solid at the back
Well-known member
Why the f*** would anyone be intrested in this wedding? Dont u have ur own lives to live lol
Blues Rock DJ
New member
loving the plug on Five Live......along the lines of ' catch the first sighting of the dress'.............as bad as listening to snooker I'd imagine!!
Hunting 784561
New member
- Jul 8, 2003
- 3,651
Make them ride bicycles, I really cant believe we are so spineless and fawning to the whole medieval charade.
Also cant believe the Yanks are going so nuts over this - George Washington must be spinning in his grave.
Also cant believe the Yanks are going so nuts over this - George Washington must be spinning in his grave.
Tricky Dicky
New member
When all you have to look forward to all year is a ceremonial pastie bake to mark the tin mine season, the opening of an envelope would be big news. Still, with no electricity down there, I guess you'll get to hear all about it by carrier pidgeon.
It's a bit like the World Cup isn't it? Not everybody in Britain cares about that but we all like it. I think calling it 'broken Britain' is a bit strong just because a very large part of the population couldn't give a rat's arse about a society wedding.
NMH
Banned
That the Americans and many other people's care is jolly bloody good show for us, and any tourism it attracts will help our economy.
Why Britons do not care as much as they might have in bygone days, is that there's a reduction in patriotism for many.
Also, that there have been previous weddings and results that we haven't seen go swimmingly, Charles' sham wedding with Dianne, apathy towards any 'special' family we retain (so people have had their intellects eclipse attention for people they don't know, that we don't respect for much, in a country that is increasingly jaundiced about such matters).
She is not a queen and he's not a king, so they rate low as offspring to another bloke who's 'only' a prince.
And we all have our own lives to maintain interest in.
Why Britons do not care as much as they might have in bygone days, is that there's a reduction in patriotism for many.
Also, that there have been previous weddings and results that we haven't seen go swimmingly, Charles' sham wedding with Dianne, apathy towards any 'special' family we retain (so people have had their intellects eclipse attention for people they don't know, that we don't respect for much, in a country that is increasingly jaundiced about such matters).
She is not a queen and he's not a king, so they rate low as offspring to another bloke who's 'only' a prince.
And we all have our own lives to maintain interest in.
Soton Seagull
Well-known member
Perhaps because of the utter irrelevance it has to the lives of normal people?
Yes it's nice to have a day off, but Royals are such an antiquated idea. The devine right of Kings does not really go hand in hand with the idea of a liberal democracy.
Personally I find the people camped outside Westminster Abbey a national embarrasment; bolstering the belief of outsiders that we are a nation of barking eccentrics.
Yes it's nice to have a day off, but Royals are such an antiquated idea. The devine right of Kings does not really go hand in hand with the idea of a liberal democracy.
Personally I find the people camped outside Westminster Abbey a national embarrasment; bolstering the belief of outsiders that we are a nation of barking eccentrics.
Agreed. Although when the BBC interviewed some of these pavement camping dorks, it turned out that most of them were foreign.
Still, plenty of time to interview the Brits on the pavement. They are the same muppets who will be queuing for three days to watch more Andy Murray quarter final glory in July.
:vuvu2:The correct term for these people is TWATRIOTS
bhaexpress
New member
Exactly, for a start most of the posters are male and frankly a lot less likely to be interested in any wedding, Royal or otherwise. I know my Canadian cousin and the women in her family will be glued to their TVs, I think the blokes will either be working or fishing.
Albumen
Don't wait for me!
A good read that sums up the general feeling . . .
The selection of Kate Middleton, a lowly commoner drawn from the very dregs of society, as Prince William's bride has been the subject of great speculation, much of it thinly veiled snobbery. But Britain is broken. Social mobility is at a historic low, state education and public healthcare are in crisis, and our own prime minister has blamed the truculent immigrant and his concealed wife for our lack of national cohesion. Once upon a time, royal marriages were political acts that forged links between different nations. Instead, William and Kate's wedding will bind this nation to itself, and in marrying so very far beneath himself, I believe the young prince has made a heroic and deliberate sacrifice to achieve this end.
Pause for a moment. Imagine being Prince William. Imagine knowing that the best justification most rational people could come up with for your heavily subsidised existence was that you were a symbolic figure. And symbolic of what, the boy must wonder. History? The land? The nation itself? A notion of refined nobility? Grace under pressure? Or perhaps some abstract idea of temporal continuity? Unable to escape being a symbolic figure, the prince's recent activities suggest he has chosen instead to embrace the role in the most profound way imaginable. And, I believe, this is why the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton itself seems symbolic on an admirable and unprecedented level.
Jessie L Weston's 1920 study of Holy Grail mythology, From Ritual to Romance, pictures Britain as a wasteland, an image appropriated by TS Eliot to describe the aftermath of the first world war. The Fisher King must search the devastated terrain for the Holy Grail, and drink from it to heal the land. Broken Britain is that wasted land. William is that Fisher King. Kate Middleton is that lovely grail, full not of the blood of the crucified Christ, but of the blood of the Middletons, who run a children's partyware business in Berkshire. And Kate's wedding to wise William is a ritual that may help to fix what David Cameron's vision of the Big Society so far has not. For in choosing Kate, a simple girl from a school near Swindon, as his bride, William is in fact taking each and every British subject – man, woman, old, young, black, white, Christian and Muslim – into his royal bed, and binding us all to each other in the white heat of his princely passion.
Kate was educated at Marlborough College in Wiltshire. It is a private school, yes, but it is no Eton, and its most famous alumni are little more than flannelled fools: the comedian Jack Whitehall, the children's author Lauren Child, and the pop musician Chris de Burgh, whose 1976 Christmas hit A Spaceman Came Travelling describes an alien being's disappointment in the shortcomings of human society – disappointments it appears William shares, and is trying to address in his own esoteric way. But his motives for plucking a bride from such an inauspicious establishment are, I believe, twofold, and we must admire and accept the occult reasoning behind his selfless choice.
First of all, Marlborough College, where Kate Middleton flushed into womanhood, is set in a magical landscape that has been declared a world heritage site, being only five miles from the exact centre of the Avebury stone circle. Perhaps Kate's growing body absorbed the magical energies of the region. Perhaps it did not. It does not matter. She is from, and she is of, the ancient wetland. The arrangement of the 6,000-year-old circle, and the stone rows, burial chambers and mounds that surround it, is explicitly symbolic, explicitly sexual and explicitly ritualistic, and as such it shares the same transformative agenda as Friday's royal wedding.
In Avebury, the West Kennet Avenue, a long row of erotically paired stones, uncoils snake-like from the circle, as if to penetrate nearby Silbury Hill, a fecund 37-metre-high female belly, which rises from the marsh to meet it. The prince has taken his lowly bride from within this charged landscape, where our ancestors celebrated the union of man and woman in stone and earth, and began the communal processes that forged a nation from their descendents, the broken nation that William the Fisher King must now heal. Our shaman-prince could not have chosen a better receptacle for his magical purposes than Kate Middleton, a peasant-spawned serf-girl, sodden with the primordial mire of the Swindon-shadowed swamplands.
Secondly, in choosing a commoner for his bride, William gives hope to millions of socially disenfranchised Britons. Only two Tory generations ago, the prime minister Margaret Thatcher was proud to proclaim herself "a grocer's daughter". A mere 20 years since she passed power on to John Major, a garden gnome salesman with six O-levels, it is impossible to imagine either in government today, composed, as it is, principally of former members of the elite Oxford vomiting society the Bullingdon Club. The state-schools system is stretched to the limit; the withdrawal of further education grants deters poorer students; and government contributions to the Bookstart scheme, which gives books to children who might otherwise have none, have been halved. It is not possible to imagine a Thatcher ever getting out of Lincolnshire today, let alone becoming prime minister.
But in snatching Kate from the gutter, William stooped even lower than he would have done had he chosen Margaret Thatcher for his bride. Kate's parents aren't even grocers. They sell novelty hats and paper plates. It's no coincidence that as genuine social mobility in broken Britain is eroded, so commoners turn to the National Lottery, The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent. Winning them represents the only chance real people have to change their circumstances significantly. It could be you. And, like some giant illuminated penis flying over the rooftops of suburban homes and frothing at random passing women, William has pointed himself at Kate Middleton, the Susan Boyle of social mobility. In declaring her his princess, he brings hope of real change to millions of people denied a decent education and the means to better themselves, to millions of tiny babies denied even books, that one day they too could be randomly rewarded with untold wealth and privilege.
The wedding of my wife and I was a small affair, with 40 or so guests. We were not required to arrange our day along magical or symbolic lines, though admittedly some aspects of the Catholic wedding ceremony confused me, and my wife is yet to explain the tradition whereby I have been obliged ever since to sleep alone each night on the toilet. But as a symbolic figure, poor Prince William's wedding is hostage to political expediency. Consider the faces he will see as he and Kate make their solemn vows.
From the world of government, the prime minister and Mrs David Cameron, and the deputy prime minister and Ms Miriam González Durántez, holding whichever suit the prime minister has chosen not to wear; from the faith communities, the Reverend Gregorius, Anil Bhanot, Malcolm Deeboo of the Zoroastrians, The Venerable Bogoda Seelawimala Nayaka Thera, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Optimus Prime, Yog-Sothoth, Captain Marvel and Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor; and from the twin spheres of entertainment and sport, Mr Ben Fogle, Mr David Beckham and Mrs David Beckham, Mr Madonna Louise Ciccone, and Sir Elton Hercules John and Mr Sir Elton Hercules John. Candles in the wind all.
But as he gazes at this golden shower of dignitaries, it is William who will have the last guffaw. He knows that this was not so much a wedding as a psychic rescue operation, a healing ritual for broken Britain, a pantomime of hope for the terminally hopeless. In taking Kate Middleton as his bride, Prince William, more than anyone in any position of power in Britain today, has tried at least to do something to help. I hope sincerely that both of them are very happy.
Stewart Lee's insider's take on William and Kate | Stage | The Guardian
The selection of Kate Middleton, a lowly commoner drawn from the very dregs of society, as Prince William's bride has been the subject of great speculation, much of it thinly veiled snobbery. But Britain is broken. Social mobility is at a historic low, state education and public healthcare are in crisis, and our own prime minister has blamed the truculent immigrant and his concealed wife for our lack of national cohesion. Once upon a time, royal marriages were political acts that forged links between different nations. Instead, William and Kate's wedding will bind this nation to itself, and in marrying so very far beneath himself, I believe the young prince has made a heroic and deliberate sacrifice to achieve this end.
Pause for a moment. Imagine being Prince William. Imagine knowing that the best justification most rational people could come up with for your heavily subsidised existence was that you were a symbolic figure. And symbolic of what, the boy must wonder. History? The land? The nation itself? A notion of refined nobility? Grace under pressure? Or perhaps some abstract idea of temporal continuity? Unable to escape being a symbolic figure, the prince's recent activities suggest he has chosen instead to embrace the role in the most profound way imaginable. And, I believe, this is why the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton itself seems symbolic on an admirable and unprecedented level.
Jessie L Weston's 1920 study of Holy Grail mythology, From Ritual to Romance, pictures Britain as a wasteland, an image appropriated by TS Eliot to describe the aftermath of the first world war. The Fisher King must search the devastated terrain for the Holy Grail, and drink from it to heal the land. Broken Britain is that wasted land. William is that Fisher King. Kate Middleton is that lovely grail, full not of the blood of the crucified Christ, but of the blood of the Middletons, who run a children's partyware business in Berkshire. And Kate's wedding to wise William is a ritual that may help to fix what David Cameron's vision of the Big Society so far has not. For in choosing Kate, a simple girl from a school near Swindon, as his bride, William is in fact taking each and every British subject – man, woman, old, young, black, white, Christian and Muslim – into his royal bed, and binding us all to each other in the white heat of his princely passion.
Kate was educated at Marlborough College in Wiltshire. It is a private school, yes, but it is no Eton, and its most famous alumni are little more than flannelled fools: the comedian Jack Whitehall, the children's author Lauren Child, and the pop musician Chris de Burgh, whose 1976 Christmas hit A Spaceman Came Travelling describes an alien being's disappointment in the shortcomings of human society – disappointments it appears William shares, and is trying to address in his own esoteric way. But his motives for plucking a bride from such an inauspicious establishment are, I believe, twofold, and we must admire and accept the occult reasoning behind his selfless choice.
First of all, Marlborough College, where Kate Middleton flushed into womanhood, is set in a magical landscape that has been declared a world heritage site, being only five miles from the exact centre of the Avebury stone circle. Perhaps Kate's growing body absorbed the magical energies of the region. Perhaps it did not. It does not matter. She is from, and she is of, the ancient wetland. The arrangement of the 6,000-year-old circle, and the stone rows, burial chambers and mounds that surround it, is explicitly symbolic, explicitly sexual and explicitly ritualistic, and as such it shares the same transformative agenda as Friday's royal wedding.
In Avebury, the West Kennet Avenue, a long row of erotically paired stones, uncoils snake-like from the circle, as if to penetrate nearby Silbury Hill, a fecund 37-metre-high female belly, which rises from the marsh to meet it. The prince has taken his lowly bride from within this charged landscape, where our ancestors celebrated the union of man and woman in stone and earth, and began the communal processes that forged a nation from their descendents, the broken nation that William the Fisher King must now heal. Our shaman-prince could not have chosen a better receptacle for his magical purposes than Kate Middleton, a peasant-spawned serf-girl, sodden with the primordial mire of the Swindon-shadowed swamplands.
Secondly, in choosing a commoner for his bride, William gives hope to millions of socially disenfranchised Britons. Only two Tory generations ago, the prime minister Margaret Thatcher was proud to proclaim herself "a grocer's daughter". A mere 20 years since she passed power on to John Major, a garden gnome salesman with six O-levels, it is impossible to imagine either in government today, composed, as it is, principally of former members of the elite Oxford vomiting society the Bullingdon Club. The state-schools system is stretched to the limit; the withdrawal of further education grants deters poorer students; and government contributions to the Bookstart scheme, which gives books to children who might otherwise have none, have been halved. It is not possible to imagine a Thatcher ever getting out of Lincolnshire today, let alone becoming prime minister.
But in snatching Kate from the gutter, William stooped even lower than he would have done had he chosen Margaret Thatcher for his bride. Kate's parents aren't even grocers. They sell novelty hats and paper plates. It's no coincidence that as genuine social mobility in broken Britain is eroded, so commoners turn to the National Lottery, The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent. Winning them represents the only chance real people have to change their circumstances significantly. It could be you. And, like some giant illuminated penis flying over the rooftops of suburban homes and frothing at random passing women, William has pointed himself at Kate Middleton, the Susan Boyle of social mobility. In declaring her his princess, he brings hope of real change to millions of people denied a decent education and the means to better themselves, to millions of tiny babies denied even books, that one day they too could be randomly rewarded with untold wealth and privilege.
The wedding of my wife and I was a small affair, with 40 or so guests. We were not required to arrange our day along magical or symbolic lines, though admittedly some aspects of the Catholic wedding ceremony confused me, and my wife is yet to explain the tradition whereby I have been obliged ever since to sleep alone each night on the toilet. But as a symbolic figure, poor Prince William's wedding is hostage to political expediency. Consider the faces he will see as he and Kate make their solemn vows.
From the world of government, the prime minister and Mrs David Cameron, and the deputy prime minister and Ms Miriam González Durántez, holding whichever suit the prime minister has chosen not to wear; from the faith communities, the Reverend Gregorius, Anil Bhanot, Malcolm Deeboo of the Zoroastrians, The Venerable Bogoda Seelawimala Nayaka Thera, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Optimus Prime, Yog-Sothoth, Captain Marvel and Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor; and from the twin spheres of entertainment and sport, Mr Ben Fogle, Mr David Beckham and Mrs David Beckham, Mr Madonna Louise Ciccone, and Sir Elton Hercules John and Mr Sir Elton Hercules John. Candles in the wind all.
But as he gazes at this golden shower of dignitaries, it is William who will have the last guffaw. He knows that this was not so much a wedding as a psychic rescue operation, a healing ritual for broken Britain, a pantomime of hope for the terminally hopeless. In taking Kate Middleton as his bride, Prince William, more than anyone in any position of power in Britain today, has tried at least to do something to help. I hope sincerely that both of them are very happy.
Stewart Lee's insider's take on William and Kate | Stage | The Guardian
fork me
I have changed this
Two people who I've never met are getting married. Why SHOULD I give a toss? It has nothing to do with me, nor does it have anything to do with "broken Britain".
There's a lot more important things going on in the World, and in the UK for that matter, then their wedding.
Norman Potting
Well-known member
bhaexpress
New member
Actually if you pay tax you're helping subsidise it, whether you want to or not.