Читать книгу The Lost Diaries - Craig Brown, Craig Brown - Страница 15

The river flows, and it keeps flowin’. And having flown, it flows again. There’s no rhyme or reason, my friend, that’s just the way rivers flow. What is in the river is not river but water, but it’s not just the water that flows, but the river too.

BOB DYLAN

Yet another programme on the television about the so-called Queen but it doesn’t answer the question: who the heck is the REAL Elizabeth Windsor? A lot of people think that just because she’s commander-in-chief of the British armed forces, she’s out there with her machine-gun and her stash of grenades, leading her troops into battle against her subject peoples on a day-to-day basis. Not so. Aged eighty years old, she hasn’t so much as raised a fist and given an assailant a bloody nose or kicked an opponent in the balls with her dainty size-four feet for quite a few years now.

Instead, she sits all alone in a basement of Buckingham Castle with the curtains drawn watching repeats of EastEnders on her ten-inch black-and-white television while scooping tinned spaghetti hoops into her mouth with her gloved hands. She could watch absolutely anything she chose – she’s even got a remote control, for crying out loud – including programmes about culture and politics. But no, she does not choose. Instead, she just sits there, watching whatever she wants. Just like my mother in her aged care facility. These old people truly make my blood boil. The Queen could have taken an Aborigine male to her marriage bed and thus presented a beacon of hope to all the oppressed people of the world, but did she do it? Did she heck. An Aborigine husband would have signalled that whatever her toffee-nosed advisers might tell her, dammit, she was on the side of the poor and the craply-treated. And the young couple could have gone on a true Royal walkabout, living off grubs and nettles and tracing the songlines of the Home Counties for a period of seven years before returning barefoot to the so-called civilisation that is commonly known – don’t make me laugh! – as London Town. But she just didn’t make the effort. Ha! Don’t talk to Lilibet about effort. Sorry, guys –it’s a word that doesn’t feature in her vocabulary.

GERMAINE GREER