An anachronism

It's so strange to watch the odd arrangement and the stratagems of the Coronation, especially the importance of the crowning process itself and the mystic of noblesse oblige.

 The House of Windsor has been playing its self out on our screens. There is a fascination with Royalty especially when the power of the various royal families in Europe was crucial in the political machinations that were for ever rumbling between nations.

Kings and queens held sway in courts which were out of sight to the ordinary man and woman. Grainy black and white film shows them lining up like battleships far out to sea, massive and remote, their ceremony and the splendour were a pageant of fairy-tail proportions, a massive theatrical pantomime complete with heroes and heroines but largely jesters and jackanapes.
The movers and shakers who move behind the throne, the traditionalists and monarchist, steeped in the minutiae of protocol, oblivious to the way the ordinary person would think they inculcate our thinking like a novelist such as J K Rowling's with her creative underworld.
With the mist of oblige  our eyes cast down to a respectful glance or two, we watch what they do and wonder at their tomfoolery. The act they lay on is so stiff and predicable its a wonder a whole series hasn't been made to go hand in hand with the modern dysfunctional family in Wigan.
Surrounded by fawning functionaries and courters who resemble stuffed fish in their courtier clothes is it any wonder that the Royals become consumed by it all and lose touch with reality.
The film showed the matriarch Queen Mother now, on her husbands death, relegated behind her daughter yet, as mothers do, still wishing to influence.

Her stubborn refusal to move out from Buckingham Palace to a 12 bedroomed pad down the Mall on account of it "being too small" and then after the house, Clarence House had been refurbished and modernised by Elizabeth and Prince Philip in their time prior to becoming Queen, the Queen Mother insisted on another refurbishment before she would move in. It's astounding that she would assume it her right to spend the taxpayers money so regally but she did and they still do.

The Dutch have got it right. Their Queen is truly one of them, with her in-ostentatious ordinary lifestyle, she has succeeded in democratising the pomp and majesty and made herself a much loved ordinary citizen. Wilhelmina, Juliana and Beatrix were Queens who gave way to holding a more pragmatic position regarding what is after all, an anachronism.