Continuing its tradition of fearlessly tackling any subject, no matter how weighty, this blog now turns its attention to the Royal Wedding.
On 29th July 1981, the day Charles and Diana married, I was on holiday in Scotland. In the morning I went into Lochinver to send a postcard to a girl I was seeing. Sadly, I can still remember the card: two caricature Scotsmen looking up at a wall-mounted stag's head - "Did you get him in the Trossachs?", says one; "Nooo", the other replies, "right between the eyes".
It may well be that the uncanny ability to remember trivial information of this type was the kind of characteristic which led to her dumping me immediately on my return.
(My successor in the post was one of our lecturers in the Law department of Nottingham University; no doubt I'd have had to report him to the authorities for kiddy-fiddling in our more responsible times, but then I merely satisfied myself with running him out in the next staff-student cricket match. If you're reading, Louise, no hard feelings.)
Marriage was far from my mind then, and while my friends spent the day in the Culag Hotel watching Charles and Diana's big day, I went fishing. I felt a certain sniffy contempt for the Royal family.
Times change. I have now been married for nearly twenty years, and I quite like the monarchy. No doubt this is partly attributable to the rightward-sweeping tide that pulls most middle-aged people with it. My calculation is that Charles is an intelligent and cultured man, that his probable successor looks as if he is shaping up reasonably well, that the monarchy probably brings in at least the cost of the Civil List by way of tourist revenue, and that if we had an elected President instead we would be more likely to get a Ken Livingstone or Boris Johnson applying than a Vaclav Havel or Nelson Mandela. If it's not obviously broken, don't try and fix it.
As for weddings, they are symbolic occasions in which, against all the evidence, two people embark on a journey (oh Lord, how I hoped I would never use that expression), a gamble if you prefer, one with emotional, financial and existential stakes, without any idea of the outcome. Weddings have about them the same atmosphere that must linger at the dockside when someone sets out to sail around the world, or at the airport departure lounge when mountaineers go off to try their hand at Everest: excitement mingled with trepidation.
I find weddings poignant events now. Thoughtful protagonists know that they cannot possibly know what the journey will be like; we observers, battle-scarred veterans of the institution, know that there is a further layer of almost Rumsfeldian ignorance beyond the grasp of the bride and groom. These people are innocents, signing up for something, good and bad, of whose reality they can have almost no conception. A Royal wedding carries the additional charge that the couple will form part of the distant cultural and political backdrop of British lives for decades to come; it pains me to adopt such an egregious cliche, but now I see why journalists write about "history being made".
So good luck to William and Kate. They will need it. My daughters will be glued to the TV tomorrow. I might go fishing.
