What lovely, genuine laughter!

Unlike the nauseating virtue signalling and wearing of sack cloth by some sections of the British media and some businesses desperately seizing the moment to promote their brand claiming ‘respect’ and succeeding only in sullying their reputation – you know who I mean Center Parcs. I expect Her Majesty is having a jolly good laugh at the response by one of your customers when told that the park was shutting down for the funeral bank holiday

Good luck removing guests from the parks. You’ve trained them in archery, shooting, swimming, canoeing and swinging through the trees like apes. You’ve basically got 5 village-loads of ninjas to clear out.

4:35 PM Sep 13, 2022
SpersJR on Twitter

Don’t know that this alone caused the U turn, expect the shedload of ridicule and outrage helped them to come to their senses.

Frankly, I don’t have a TV to avoid and the radio is tuned to a commercial station but even that is seldom on currently. It gets a bit much when some young person whose nearest proximity to HM was licking a stamp, feels they have to emote some tribute, which uncannily turns out to be one of her recordings! How very blatent.

A recent poll revealed that people aged 18-24 were not very keen on having a monarchy. This seems a strange question to be sufficiently concerned over that it was polled. And there have been mutterings in the newspaper about an elected head of state, mainly by commenters; yes we have such a great track record of electing suitable leaders, especially as the age group of concern here was at most 12 when the Tories were elected. I am not a monarchist, or a republican, (is that an Oxford comma? – see our Secretary of State for Health lol) but better the devil you know, so to speak. Sweet Jesus, we would otherwise probably end up with Johnson again!

As for the inheritance tax, the Crown Estate income is where the Civil List payment is drawn from with the bulk of the income going to the Treasury, so we have already had our pound of flesh. But the general public don’t seem to want to hear that, wonder why?

And already the haters on TikTok are putting the metaphorical boot into the Queen Consort and turning on Megan, Duchess of Sussex, I suppose this is back in fashion again; why won’t they leave her alone? Apparently, the base over there are Gen Z, age range 10-25, ooh spookily coinciding with that poll mentioned above. Isn’t it peculiar that the age range most consciously aware of not causing offence, feel so justified in doing exactly that if it is someone they disapprove of; perhaps I misunderstand and it is only when someone is offensive towards them. That double standard used to be called hypocricy. I think it’s called snowflake now.

Was my generation of punk rockers as nasty as this generation? I certainly don’t recall it; there was the three day week and power cuts, the start of AIDS and everyone was hyper hysterical about cuts and nosebleeds, before moving into the Thatcher years when it became truly grim. But maybe. It was before most of the antidiscrimination and equality laws were written , so it probably depended on whatever demographics you belonged in and location. People did tend to be judgmental but usually that was expressed by an attitude rather than verbalised, because bullies are invariably cowards. And lacking any social media amplification kept it to a human scale.

There is a very old joke that goes something along the lines of…

A door to door salesman knocks at the door with his case of encyclopedias, offering them for sale to the householder. The householder declines the offer and the dejected salesman asks why he was uninterested in buying the wonderful collection of knowledge. The man replies that undoubtedly these are wonderful and amazing books but as he has an 18 years old son, they already have someone who knows it all.

I guess some things never change. My generation thought they knew it all but quickly learnt that we didn’t. Same with our parents and our children. They will in time. And they won’t do any better or worse than we did about it. A rare few will achieve something of significance.

In truth, the vast majority have a lifetime ahead of miserable toil punctured by brief glimpses of triumphs, chasing a happiness that will elude them all the while they seek it through others or status, until looking within and finding a purpose that aligns with their values and which they can live that brings a contentment through the satisfactions of living to that purpose. It is not the end result, it is the living; not the destination, but travelling the route.