Monday
The feast of St Crispin was removed from the calendar of the Catholic church in 1965 by Vatican II, but that’s no barrier to liturgical disruptor Jacob Rees-Mogg. This year the celebration of Saints Crispin and Crispinian falls on Tuesday 25 October and, one assumes, Rees-Mogg is already drafting his letter of resignation on Monday. The final article, sent the following day, is dated with the kind of whimsical flourish one has come to expect from the man: “St Crispin’s Day, 2022.”
As ever, it is curious to consider the size of the gap between the self-image maintained by Boris Johnson and his cohorts, and the dull thud of reality. Johnson, in his mind’s eye, is a charming combo of Churchill, Socrates and Bertie Wooster, while the reality is closer to Harold Skimpole, the amoral sponge from Bleak House. Rees-Mogg, on the other hand, imagines himself the English nobleman, whose playful, foppish veneer conceals the heart of a lion. By invoking St Crispin, he obviously reaches for Henry V and “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers” when the reality, to quote an old episode of the Thick of It, is the man from the Mr Muscle advert.
What a country. Women have fewer heroic tropes available to them, hence Truss’s long reach towards Thatcher as her model, probably the least bonkers thing she did. Ancient history, now, of course, and we wait patiently to see if the top job unleashes, from behind Rishi Sunak’s earnest head-boy exterior, some wildly off-target, classical persona.
Tuesday
It’s a leisurely start for the new King, who, we learn this week, is greeted at 9am every day by bagpipes. He must be exhausted. So many pens to lift, so many documents to sign, so many prime ministers coming and going. To you and me, bagpipes on top of all this might be the absolute tin lid on it, but of course, the royals are not like us.
And while, on the basis of wider evidence – from Tina Brown’s latest book about the royals, we understand that King Charles has been known to travel with his own bed, toilet seat and paintings – one might suspect the whole piper thing to be a personal affectation, it turns out that’s not the case at all.
His Majesty’s Pipe Major was, in fact, a position created by Queen Victoria in 1843, and there have been 17 pipers to date. It’s a nice gig if you can get it; a mere 15 minutes of playing a day, with a break in the middle for tuning. The piper himself, meanwhile, must travel with the royal party between residences and be ready, at the appointed hour, to march up and down beneath the monarch’s window.
For King Charles, this Tuesday is the first time the Pipe Major has played for him and, one imagines, it must be another profoundly strange reminder that his mother is gone. The bigger question is whether the 9am setting is proscribed as a matter of royal protocol, or is a setting peculiar to the individual monarch. Is the King really still asleep as Good Morning Britain wraps up? If he’s awake, is he still in bed? And what are the options for a snooze setting?
Wednesday
A woman in Indonesia has been eaten whole by a python and it shames me to admit it but, unsatisfied with coverage in the Guardian, I apply myself to the internet in search of a photo. (I can’t find one.) Still, I’m fascinated by the logistics of this event; how does a slow-moving python have time to crush a human victim before they can raise the alarm? What stage of consciousness might one be in while the eating takes place? How did police know she was in there? And how, according to reports, did the thing remove her jacket and shoes before swallowing her down?
Unseemly speculations all, but snakes doing horrible things is a sub-genre of journalism I can’t get enough of. For those similarly afflicted, I’d direct your attention to the recent snake on a plane story coming out of Florida, the recent snake-through-a-window story from Essex, and (ultimate horror) some cobras in Jakarta coming up through the toilet.
Thursday
In “alright, grandma” news this week, we find Madonna and Cardi B having a spat over social media about who invented sex. Madonna, in her telling of it, paved the way for all those who came after with her pioneering book, Sex. “Now Cardi B can sing about her WAP. Kim Kardashian can grace the cover of any magazine with her naked ass and Miley Cyrus can come in like a wrecking ball.” She signed off, “you’re welcome, bitches” and did a clown emoji.
This seems uncontroversial to me; Madonna, as pop elder, simply introducing her heirs to the notion of Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence. The younger generation refused to play along, however, and here came Cardi B to put Madge straight. “I literally payed this woman homage so many times,” she replied in a series of tweets, since deleted. “She can make her point without putting clown emojis and getting slick out the mouth.” They made up five minutes later, after a phone call right up there with JFK calling Moscow during the Cuban missile crisis. But in any case, the whole thing felt like a misunderstanding based on Madonna’s sketchy understanding of how people under 30 perceive the clown emoji. (Not in a fun way.)
Friday
The toilet seat King Charles travels with is presumably top of the range, but even if it’s solid gold it can’t be more valuable than a proposed $1.7m loo in San Francisco. News that the city was planning to build a 14sq metre (150sq ft) cubicle to house a single public toilet is only the latest indicator of how uninhabitably expensive that city has become. (Architecture fees alone were $350,000.)
After being exposed by the San Francisco Chronicle, details of the overpriced bog rose all the way to Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, who felt obliged to state that, “a single, small bathroom should not cost $1.7m”. Perhaps this could start a series of public statements from legislators calling out inflationary costs as absurd: a litre of milk shouldn’t cost $6.99, a loaf of bread shouldn’t cost more than a fiver, and housing costs shouldn’t come to more than half your monthly income. Those responsible – in the broadest sense – should stick to making wry references to defunct Catholic saints and leave the rest of us be.
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