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The Royal wedding


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I can't say I'm all that interested in the wedding of two people I don't know, have never met and who don't know me either. On the other hand, that nice young couple who saved hard to buy the house up the road and who greet me with a smile and a hello every time they see me - that's different.

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On ‎5‎/‎6‎/‎2018 at 12:58 AM, Oddquine said:

I'm  really lucky.....I don't have a TV licence...and even if I did, I wouldn't watch the wedding of the lassie from Suits no matter who she was marrying.

 

I have the good luck to be spending most of the day in question driving down to Manchester from Inverness so can contrive to escape a lot of this overhyped nonsense.

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1 hour ago, Charles Bannerman said:

I have the good luck to be spending most of the day in question driving down to Manchester from Inverness so can contrive to escape a lot of this overhyped nonsense.

You could break your journey at Hampden, and watch the double treble being achieved. 

Oh, sorry, you said "overhyped nonsense".   As you were! :wink:

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2 hours ago, Kingsmills said:

Certainly a bit of Hun ancestry.

More than a bit... although they are more sort of central European inbreds (in a biological rather than necessarily a pejorative sense) because everybody seems to be everybody else's cousin. For instance the queen is really Mrs Elizabeth Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg and Phil The Greek, who is a cousin, common ancestor Queen Victoria, is as much a Dane as anything else.

More recently they have taken to breeding with Brits though, Kate and Di being English and the Queen Mum Scottish. But the Queen Mum was the first British blood to be injected into the British royal line since James VI and I in 1567/1603, and even he was quarter French.

Diana was actually the first English blood to go into the royal family since Elizabeth of York who died in 1503 and was the wife of Henry VII of England - who was really Welsh. Confused?

You will really find very little Britishness about the British royal family although the "Hun (a common term during WWI and WW2) ancestry" had to be concealed in 1917 when "Saxe Coburg Gotha" was considered a tad too Teutonic - especially since Gotha aeroplanes were bombing the sh*t out of London at the time. So they went for Windsor instead, while the Battenburgs went for Mountbatten.

Piece of cake really!

Never mind. Maybe after Brexit they will be repatriated!

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7 hours ago, Charles Bannerman said:

You will really find very little Britishness about the British royal family

Well, yes and no. There's also the fact that every British monarch - from James VI and I onwards - has been part descended from Mary, Queen of Scots. The Stuarts, the Hanoverians, the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas - all of them! 

Delicious irony, after the treatment she received on both sides of the border. Though of course you could argue about how British she was, given her childhood in France, and her forebears' tendency to marry fancy foreign wummen!

There's a family tree at https://www.britroyals.com/royaltree.asp     

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4 hours ago, snorbens_caleyman said:

There's also the fact that every British monarch - from James VI and I onwards - has been part descended from Mary, Queen of Scots. The Stuarts, the Hanoverians, the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas - all of them! 

    

Correct. And Mary Queen of Scots herself was half French, quarter English, one eighth Danish and one eighth Scottish (ie more English than Scottish). Her second husband, Darnley (who was James VI and I's father) was Scottish and since then the royal bloodline has been diluted through 12 generations by marriages successively to a Dane, eight Germans, another Dane, another German and a Brit/Scot (the Queen Mum). That means 11 generations of the British royal family across about 350 years where there was NO input of British blood. But yet British people are more or less expected by the establishment to bow and scrape and use ridiculously sycophantic forms of address to these foreigners.

That also means that, by the time you get to George VI, the current queen's dad, he has around 0.05% of the British/Scottish blood that James VI had - and that was little more than half. But at least the Queen Mum, Diana and Kate have restored the situation - or does that injection of "common" :redcard::amazed: British blood meant to make the younger royals more bowable and scrapable to?

So, to return to the original subject, why is so much fuss being made about this wedding of two over-privileged foreigners? The whole concept of royalty is a complete nonsense - and that's before you consider the possibility of them really being the products of a bit of illicit How's Your Father behind the throne with the stable boy, the page or the Groom of the Stool.

Edited by Charles Bannerman
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  • 2 weeks later...
43 minutes ago, Kingsmills said:

The BBC website is giving much more prominence to this than an air crash in which over a hundred people lost their lives. What a strange World we inhabit.

If they didn't, they'd be accused of being monsters for only pedalling the bad news and ignoring a happy event.

I'm no fan of the royal wedding, but it's a welcome change from the constant stream of misery that usually occupies the news.

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After avoiding these shenanigans during daylight hours my day was ruined when I walked into the living to find Mrs G watching the news on TV - and there they were. :crazy:Sometimes life just isn't fair. :cry: 

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The crowds obviously enjoyed it,  Nice weather a day out,  A lot of church going for people who have never been in a church for years, An American hell fire preacher, I didn't care much for. 

Apparently worth scores of millions in tourism for the treasury.

What more can you ask.  Basically two nice people getting hitched , hope it lasts. As Homer Simpson said " Marriage is a three year commitment ",   Mine has lasted 49 years , with at least  several rows a week to make it interesting.

When the groom says " better or worse ",  I always feel the bride is thinking " how much worse",? 

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I hope it does bring in a lot of cash to the treasury because a lot went out of the treasury in terms of security costs.  The whole route of the carriage procession was lined on both sides with police with roughly every third one clutching powerful automatic weapons to their chests.  And that was just the visible security.  I don't know if this was a response to what was seen as a viable specific threat or whether it was just reflection the general level threat felt to exist.  Either way, it was a sober reminder of how fragile our peaceful, democratic way of life is.

Whatever you may feel about people getting into positions of privilege and influence as a result of who their parents are rather than because they have earned it, the fact is that the British Royal family are hugely popular and events like royal weddings bring a lot of joy and happiness to millions.  In their day to day lives the senior royals do a lot of good work, much of it very much behind the scenes.  And the young royals are increasingly getting involved in more challenging issues.  If the most deprived in society can feel that the most high profile and privileged people in the country genuinely care about their plight and want to to something to help then it can have a profound effect on people's lives.  I think that Harry and Megan are going to be a very effective team in developing this positive aspect of the royal family.  

The security at their wedding reminded us that there is evil lurking in our society, but as the sun shone on the cheering crowds and the happy couple, the joy and goodness of people shone through.  Long may that continue.

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The latest generation of royals are spun as having a social conscience.

I would find that a great deal more convincing if they had invited the local registrar to marry them in private in front of a dozen or two of their friends and family with the millions upon millions that must have been spent on pomp, security and all the rest being, at their request, being earmarked and ring fenced to buy land and build decent social housing in terraces with gardens for all those displaced by the Grenfell tragedy.

That truly would have been a worthwhile and lasting legacy that the couple and the nation could be proud of.

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6 hours ago, Kingsmills said:

The latest generation of royals are spun as having a social conscience.

I would find that a great deal more convincing if they had invited the local registrar to marry them in private in front of a dozen or two of their friends and family with the millions upon millions that must have been spent on pomp, security and all the rest being, at their request, being earmarked and ring fenced to buy land and build decent social housing in terraces with gardens for all those displaced by the Grenfell tragedy.

That truly would have been a worthwhile and lasting legacy that the couple and the nation could be proud of.

It wouldn't bother me in the slightest if the Royal Family disappeared off the face of the earth tomorrow.....but I don't believe for a second that if they did then we'd have more cash to tackle poverty.  It's just not that binary, regardless of where you sit on the argument about whether the Royals bring any economic benefit to the country...or not.

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