Bumpy year

I know what the dear old Queen means when she says it has been a “bumpy year”. I’ve been in the Bristol Royal Infirmary (BRI) quite a lot lately and it’s certainly been a very “bumpy year” for those who are patients and indeed those who are visiting the patients. It’s been a “bumpy year” for the hospital staff who produce miracles on a shoestring budget. But let’s hear it for Queen Elizabeth II.

It will certainly be a relief to the Queen and the rest of her extended family that her old man, Prince Philip of Corfu, has been discharged from hospital. He’d been admitted for treatment to a pre-existing condition and, like many decent folk, royalists and republicans alike, we must hope he did not encounter too many delays because of the long waiting lists. Oh, wait. The royal family, thanks to Joe Public’s generous funding, are able to jump the queues and enjoy the best medical treatment our money can buy. It’s why, along with not having proper jobs, they all live into old age.

I can imagine at the age of 93, and looking tired and frail, Liz might fancy a quiet Christmas in the armchair, watching her own speech, perhaps (someone has to), and stuffing some top dollar nosh into the royal cake hole. Instead, she has to spend time with her dysfunctional family.

Our next King – Prince Charles, would you believe? – will be there with the love of his life, the charmless Camilla Parker-Bowles, Prince Andrew will be there, hidden behind the curtains in order to avoid tricky questions about those happy years he spent with a predatory paedophile. That should make for some jolly conversations as Prince Edward cracks a few nuts. He’s got to have something to do in order to justify his existence.

Will Harry and Meghan be there? Christ, I wouldn’t be if I was one of them. I’d take my young child to somewhere like Centre Parcs and lock the door behind me. I’d get a few tinnies, order a TV dinner and carry on with planning my exit from this broken country whose media has decreed that his wife is – and let’s be honest about this – the wrong colour.

Jeremy Corbyn was slaughtered by the gutter press for not realising the Queen’s speech was in the afternoon and not the morning on Xmas day and made a half-hearted effort to pretend he watched it. I detest dishonesty in politics, which makes this a very bad time to be alive. Why didn’t he just admit that, like the vast majority of us, he doesn’t watch it and, quite frankly, doesn’t give a toss what the Queen has to say?

When Harry and Meghan emigrate to America – next year, maybe? – that will be it for me. Along with William, to an admittedly lesser extent, the balding ginger one and his beautiful wife kept me interested because they were interesting and, relatively speaking of course, understood the lives of ordinary folk.

It’s been a “bumpy year” for her maj, but then there are 2900 homeless people in Bristol whose lives haven’t exactly been the best this year. There are 14 million people in poverty in our green and increasingly unpleasant land and there are millions doing shit jobs for next to no money. I doubt that they will be feeling the greatest sympathy with a family who live the lives of people with more money than God.

I mean, have a good time, your maj, but spare me the “bumpy year” stuff, unless you are referring to the mess our country is in, the inequality and division that shames us all and our future as we pull up the drawbridge to Europe. If that is what you do mean, then fucking say so. Otherwise, stick to the day job, opening hospitals before Boris Johnson shuts them again, laying wreaths and waving.