[Postings will be erratic for the next couple of weeks due to school holidays.]
I saw a bit of the Pope's funeral live on television - the bit between arriving home from work and going out to the movies (Being Julia - good fun, much much better than a pope's funeral.)
In fact it was co-parent who turned on the tv and wanted to watch it - out of historical interest, I suppose. I couldn't take the sight of all those old men. All those old men. Barely a woman to be seen. I look at that and think - 'This is nothing to do with me. I don't want to have anything to do with those old men.' Off out.
The next night I had already gone up to bed and was drifting off, but co-parent's narration of the guest list at the Camilla-Charles blessing made me wake up and go downstairs to watch. Why on earth was Richard E Grant there? And Rowan Atkinson? Phil Collins, not so surprising, he seems more the type to hobnob with Charles.
It looked very very cold outside Windsor Castle.
Like most other people over 30, I could not help but think back to watching Charle's first wedding live on television, in 1981. I watched it with my mother. I was one of the few people I knew who liked Diana's dress at first sight. This was despite the fact that the moment I'd read, months earlier, that Charles was engaged to a teenager, I'd snorted with derision - it screamed 'set-up'. As it was, of course.
It was so very very strange to see Charles and Camilla get out of the car and walk down that side-aisle together. I've followed this particular royal melodrama quite closely over the years - the documentaries, the biographies (authorised and unauthorised), the interviews, the magazine articles and of course, Diana's death and funeral. Yet even though I 'know' so much about these people and what they've said about each other, it still came as a shock to see that they are actually real - that it wasn't all made up by the tabloid media. He really has been having a relationship of some sort with Camilla for decades. There really were "three of us in this marriage".
Now there are just the two of them.
I liked Camilla's dress too. And if I were religious I'd have converted from Catholicism to Anglicanism on the spot - women were prominent in the procession and in the ceremony; it all seemed more lighthearted (I know, it wasn't a funeral), less ancient, less rigid, more modern. Maybe anything would have, in comparison to the scenes from Rome.
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