Ruminations

At Risk of Offending - So What?

Surely people have better things to do with themselves than allow their (admittedly mercurial celebrity-bidden) interests to be so entirely consumed by the birth of someone else's baby to the extent that they gather in large numbers, anxiously awaiting word of its arrival, and prepared to celebrate as though they had just discovered money does, after all, grow on trees, the very same trees that grow beside fountains whose sparkling beverage promises life everlasting.

A town crier reads an announcement about the royal baby outside the Lindo Wing in London, on July 22, 2013 (AFP, Andrew Cowie)

Unto the world a new prince is born, eight pounds, six ounces. "Her Royal Highness, the Duchess of Cambridge was safely delivered of a son at 4:24 p.m. Her Royal Highness and her son are both doing well." Furthermore, "The Queen and prince are delighted by the news of the birth of the baby". The older set are ecstatic and the younger demographic coo "that's so cool!" One needn't be of a Republican bent to sigh over the tedious absurdity of it all.

Crowds at Buckingham Palace cheer on July 22, 2013, as a notice is placed on an easel announcing the royal baby birth (Pool/AFP, John Stillwell)

There goes the public again, over-enthusing in a mass hysteria of celebration relating to an event that will scarce touch their own lives, and make little difference in the world wobbling precariously on its axle. Perhaps enthusiasm and the pleasures derived from it are more than a cut above a mass outpouring of grief. And perhaps there's a kind of poetic justice in the last recalled event that brought tens of thousands to London's royal Buckingham Palace was to lay funereal wreaths at the death of the baby's grandmother.

If a choice can be made, better the joy occasioned by a new birth -- any birth -- to the outpouring of grief from a death -- any death. Each is really a private affair, but in the event of royalty a most public event. At least all of the deadly boring speculation other than that which attaches to the rampant curiosity about the naming, is done and over with. The masses can move on to other notable events in which to lose themselves rather than examine the content of their own intimate lives.

Of all the inevitable events, birth and death, the pedestrian ordinariness of it being so suffocatingly overwhelmed by public acclaim and celebration is truly amazing. A sense of proportion and appropriateness completely lost in the collective admiration for the utter brilliance of two newly-marrieds figuring out how one goes about procreating, and then so successfully and magnificently producing an heir.

Really, it is tedious beyond recall. Surely any sensible individual must recognize that, without running the risk of being slurred as an obviously sour curmudgeon? It is exceedingly difficult to imagine anyone with an iota of native intelligence considering the public fascination with this birth as any emotional/social reaction other than yawning indifference at the fawning coverage.

Does it foster a sense of kinship or belonging to be informed that the royal consort's parents have purchased a large manor house to enable them to accommodate royal grandchildren in more appropriate style? And then to read that the royal couple intend to raise their offspring in a relaxed, middle-class manner? To be achieved by eschewing he presence of the traditional nanny-care.

That they will themselves live for a while in a pokey little apartment that just happens to be located within Kensington Palace. Until, that is, the $1.5-million renovation of a 21-room apartment in the same said palace has been completed, to welcome them to their future (for the time being) home. There, now; we feel so much better knowing all of that.