Ask Hadley
What shall I wear to watch the royal wedding?
Well, Martha, nothing educates more than example so I shall tell you what I will be wearing: pyjamas, bed socks and a pair of toothpicks, holding up each of my eyelids. As you might have discerned, this is an outfit with a toothpick-prodded eye more on practicalities than aesthetics, and the practicality here is that certain editors are making certain writers watch the wedding even though these writers live in a different time zone and therefore will need to be awake and pretending to care about things like “succession” and “balding princes” at 4am. Not that I’ve ever been one to complain. Stoic – that is what they have always stated about me, and by “always” I mean “never”.
But for those of you who live in the Magic Kingdom, go for it. There are few things more tedious than people who insist that they are above something when the rest of the country is suffused with festive spirit. What are you, a goth teenager sulking in your room to The Cure on Christmas Day? And did you have fun when you did that? In fact, were not you surprised when you finally left your room and found that, actually, playing Pictionary with your parents while wearing a paper crown and stuffing crisps into your gob was a much more enjoyable way to spend the day (disgust with religion, forced enjoyment and your stupid family who never understood you aside, of course)?
Of course the royal family is a totally offensive concept and these royals in particular are especially uninspiring, but just treat it as a national holiday with a particularly nationalistic bent. Get out the union flag clothing, sport some odd headwear – heck, do the Lambeth Walk, if you know what the hell that is anyway (Stephen Fry, feel free to write in. Or tweet, even, as I believe is your preferred method of communication these days. Truly the inheritor of the Wildean mantle).
Yes, everyone knows you hate the royals – you read the Guardian, for God’s sake, you have made your point. If it makes you feel better, tuck the paper into the pocket of your union flag patchworked blazer and revel in the blended message you are sending. And in no way am I just trying to make you look stupid out of bitterness at my most unjust early wake-up call. No. Not at all.
It seemed to be a huge deal when David Cameron was not going to wear a morning suit to the wedding – then it was a huge deal when he was. Which is the larger deal?
I think the biggest deal here is the revelation of Cameron’s heretofore well disguised courage. Let’s pretend that, as 10 Downing Street has insisted, Cameron was always going to wear a morning suit and it was all a huge misunderstanding when people thought he was not and, honestly, they did not do a cowardly U-turn on the issue once the Daily Mail got its Victorian knickers in a blustering twist about the story.
Let’s instead focus on how courageous our condom-wrapped prime minister is for taking the risk of reawakening memories of a certain photograph that vanished several years ago as mysteriously as an enemy of the mafia. Yes, I’m bringing up the Bullingdon Club photo, featuring an extraordinarily coiffed and clothed Cameron gazing off into the distance like an underwear model for M&S. Really, it’s the journalistic equivalent of necrophilia: have not we found a new, slightly more alive story to give us satisfaction yet?
Well, damn, this corpse of a tale is just too irresistible! And how am I supposed to move on if Cameron insists on flaunting his morning suit-clad body around town this Friday?
Even riskier than reviving Bullingdon Club memories is the issue of comparison. As anyone who has ever been foolish enough to go to their school reunion knows, the only thing that looks worse than your high-school boyfriend 20 years later is your high-school boyfriend squeezed into his old leather jacket 20 years later. Did these people never read Shakespeare: Don’t wear things that you wore in your youth – comparisons are odious!
But Brave Dave is not letting such things fluster him (or maybe they just do not teach Shakespeare at Eton.) Not even the vision of Saturday’s Daily Mail headline (“Tight fit, Dave? PM looks a bit fuller figured than he did at Oxford!) is keeping him from his morning suit on Friday. But then, of course, no one will be able to print a pic of his chubby figure next to the one from his Bullingdon days because that pic has long since been sent to sleep with the fishes.
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Submited at Tuesday, April 26th, 2011 at 12:00 am on Life Style by sofia
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