Album of the Week: Community Music

Perhaps it wasn't the best idea to go on holiday the week leading up to the Royal Wedding. Watching BBC World on hotel television was like viewing a distant, strange culture. On my return, my workplace was filled with bunting and minature Union Jacks, like the inside of William Hague's mind. But unlike William Hague's mind, it was in no way uncritical, self-satisfied and smug. Cynicism was, as always in these instances, the default reaction of my collegues and most folk. An astonishment and grinding irritation, bourne of the entire media reminding you that you are, in actual, legal fact, lower than others. If a millionaire a commoner, what the fuck is someone on minimum wage?

Perhaps it doesn't help to live in one of the Kingdom's peripheries, where notions of national identity are dual, making an idea of a national celebration a conflict at least. Whatever it was, the Royal Wedding made me angrier than a lot of more justified causes. The Wedding seemed like the horseshit cherry on top of the bullshit sundae of a decades long handwringing panic on the part of our rulers.

Whether it's Thatcher's migrant swamp, Blunkett's concern that immigrants continue to speak other (oh so other) languages at home, Tebbit's cricket test, British jobs for British workers, old maids cycling past village greens pissed on warm beer etc. etc. etc., our rulers express continual concern that the British, or, whisper it, the 'British', aren't trying hard enough to be British. This is proposterous, in no way their role, and should be spat on whenever it rears its grotesque and in no small part racist head.

This absurd spectacle, with its preemptive arrests for anyone who dares criticise it in an excessively visual fashion, marks its high point. After a near half century of spurious attempts to define Britishness as based upon human rights, democracy, fair play and the like, the wedding of an unelected posh bellend (as opposed to all the elected ones), visited by war criminals and autocrats and paid for by commoners has supposedly united and defined us all as British.

Pass the sick bag, and if you can hear over the sounds of my wretching and ranting, listen to this, this, and this. It may, for a fleeting second, make you feel glad to be British.