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November 16, 2010

The Royal Wedding: My Hunger For Good News and Happy Endings

I don’t believe in fairy tales, except for the “happily ever after”, and I think that’s meant to be the part that’s suspect. Even so, it’s totally baffling why I started crying this morning upon hearing on the radio that Prince William and Kate Middleton had become engaged. I don’t really care about celebrity weddings, I think any country in this century would be better off without a royal family (unless, of course, I was the queen), princess fetishization makes me sick, and back when Prince William was everybody’s favourite pin-up, he was never ever mine– so why am I so overjoyed? Why am I fully prepared to set a clock for whatever o’ clock in the morning one day next summer, and all set to run out right away to buy a commemorative plate, or cup and saucer?

I was only two when Diana married Charles in 1981, though I do remember the excitement of Prince Andrew’s wedding to Sarah Ferguson a few years later. What I remember most about the first royal wedding, however, is that my Nana had their commemorative plates displayed in a rack in her dining room, and that we totally loved Diana. To be so unjaded– I long for that. I learned the expression “on the rocks” from the headline of a supermarket tabloid a few years later, and I remember my mom reassuring me that Chuck and Di were not so– the newspaper was a rag, she said. It hadn’t occured to me that Prince Charles might want to be somebody’s tampon, never not even once.

This evening in a nostalgic mood, I referred to the authoritative text on the 1981 Royal Wedding, which was The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 3/4. How he felt it was his “patriotic duty” to hang bunting in the street, and his disappointment in his father whose celebration consisted in hanging a Charles and Diana tea towel on the door. “ROYAL WEDDING DAY!!!!!/ How proud I am to be English!/ Foreigners must be sick as pigs.”

Anyway, I do believe in “happily ever after”, though the world keeps conspiring to prove me wrong. Not always, however– miracles happen. Remember the time my next door neighbour rose from the dead? And now Tabatha Southey has gone and been returned to the Globe and Mail, because they were clearly nothing without her. So maybe William and Kate will stay as happy as they look, and I’ll never have to explain what “on the rocks” means to Harriet, or if I do it will only be in the context of Jordan or some Kardashian.

4 thoughts on “The Royal Wedding: My Hunger For Good News and Happy Endings”

  1. Julia says:

    OK — i just read the entire spread in the G&M. I nearly cried. I probably shouldn’t be admitting this publicly, but I have a THING for the Royal Family. (I wonder if they birdwatch?!) They make me swoon, and I’m really not sure why.

    1. Kerry says:

      I saw a picture of Kate and Wills carrying a pair of dead pheasants– does that count as birdwatching?

  2. m says:

    I was surprised at my own excitement over their announcement. I didn’t think I was a Royalist, but maybe I am? Or maybe I’m just a sucker for a good love story and am hoping this will be one.

  3. Drea says:

    i think my favourite line here is:
    ” It hadn’t occured to me that Prince Charles might want to be somebody’s tampon, never not even once.”
    laughed my socks off!
    thanks! =)

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