There is no heaven, and that's the gospel truth. But if there were such a place, then my first act on arrival there would be to hold a party, at which all the guests would be medical glitterati who've had a disease named after them. Imagine the scene. There would be Herr Creutzfeld and Herr Jacob skidding about on the floor, smashing the china. Meanwhile, James Parkinson would be trembling with excitement as Prosper Ménière staggered past at a strange angle, and George Huntingdon and Thomas Sydenham argued in the corner about who, in life, had had the most successful chorea. As for Herr Alzheimer, he'd be unable even to remember what disease he'd discovered, and Sir Charles Bell would be unsure whether or not to laugh at the German scientist's predicament, so half his palsied face would grimace while the other half smiled. And standing by the piano would be Monsieur Tourette, letting rip with a torrent of filth.
It's debatable whether the last-named gentleman should be there at all because, strictly speaking, Tourette's isn't a disease, it's an inability to prevent oneself blurting out the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, warts and f***ing all. That's a point I set out to prove back in my radio days, when I made a spoof phone call to the BBC Equal Opportunities department, told them I was suffering from Tourette's, and demanded the right to audition for the post of Radio 4 announcer ("this is Radio f**king Four, time now for some bunch of w**kers to talk boll**ks on Mid-f**king-week... do I get the job?"). With Christmas approaching, our TV networks could all do with a mass outbreak of refreshingly honest Tourette's amongst their announcers, to counteract the mawkishness and sentimentality in which all broadcasting is bathed during the season of the Baby Jesus. How I long to hear someone let rip into the microphone with a stream of profane and unrestrained invective on Christmas Day, as an antidote to the mixture of goose fat, Mon Cherie liqueurs, Stone's ginger wine, saccharine hymns, and 1974 Morecambe and Wise Xmas Specials that will by then be clogging up our arteries and our brains.
SHOT: Camera 3 (wide). Her Majesty throws a pebble into the Windsor Castle lake. Shot dissolves and we see members of the royal household at work. The Venerable Royal Bird Turglar is thoroughly turgling the royal budgies. The Keeper of the Queen's Steradent is plunging the royal gnashers into a foaming mug. The Purloiner of the Royal Valuables is expertly rifling the drawers of the former Princess of Wales. And the Kilted Duke of Edinburgh is explaining that the royals only wear kilts at Yuletide (unlike Scotsmen, who wear them all year round, so that the sheep don't hear the zips).
GRAMS: Elgar, Pomp & Circumstance no. 1. The music fades, and HTM (Her Touretting Majesty) turns to camera 2. "Good afternoon, scum. Many of you plebs have probably had a thoroughly lousy year, full of fear, poverty, misery, and despair. And many of you perhaps have little time to care for the Windsors, or perhaps you even regard them as a tight-fisted, grasping, decorticated clan whose mass-abdication would cause you to miss the institution of monarchy about as much as a cat with no neck misses licking its arse. Well, f*** you, because one is doing just fine, and one is here to stay. And best of all, you are paying for one's lavish lifestyle, whether you want to or not.
That's right, motherf***ers, so swivel on this. You taxpayers are forking out for the upkeep of ten royal palaces, along with the maintenance of hundreds of grace and favour apartments, that are mostly lived in by aristos who perform no royal duties and pay peppercorn rents. And that's just for starters.
The Windsor finances are exempt from all laws, you see, and are held in a series of royal blind trusts. So called because you f***ers have to blindly trust in what one is doing with the dosh, and you have no way of finding out, even though it's public money.
In fact, one is literally above the f***ing law in almost everything one does. The power of royal assent allows one to modify government bills and to exclude the monarchy from new regulations, and what a handy rule that is. It means, for example, that the Employment Protection Consolidation Act of 1978 does not apply to the royal household, so sacked employees have no redress in law, no matter how unfair their dismissal. The monarchy is also exempt from the 1968 Race Relations Act, so one cannot be prosecuted for one's failure to employ more than a minuscule handful of what Philip so amusingly calls "slitty eyes" and "darkies." And no public record is kept of the gold, jewels, and works of art that pass annually into the royal coffers under the vague title of state gifts, even though the value of the royal collections of jewellery and art has been calculated as greatly in excess of ten billion pounds. Which suits one very nicely. May one say, one certainly does it one's way!
But don't get the idea that one's life here is just a bowl of f***ing cherries. Look around you. By now, you've probably been stuck in the same room as the rest of your family for two days, and already you want to kill half of them, and half of them want to kill you. So think about what one goes through here, having to spend all f***ing year rubbing shoulders with my dysfunctional offspring. No wonder one needs ten palaces. And Blair is even worse, coming round here at every opportunity. With every passing week, he becomes more and more presidential, and the British Constitution just isn't big enough for a queen and a president. He's steadily usurping one's role, and pretty soon all one will be left with by way of a job is waving at crowds and posing for the stamps. And if all one has to look forward to is having the back of one's head licked by a load of peasants, one may as well chuck in the royal towel now. Good afternoon and get f****d."
Of course, in reality it's unlikely that you'll even bother to tune in to the Queen's Christmas Message at all, because very few people do nowadays. We've all become too familiar with royalty, and that's the real reason for the decline of the House of Windsor. For the monarchy to be respected, it doesn't need to modernise or explain itself, it just needs to be obscure, and the more recondite the better. True, they've had terrible publicity in recent years, but their real mistake was made decades ago, when they first agreed to let cameras in through the doors, accompanied by apparently deferential commentators. None of the royals is bright enough to pass a History O Level, but surely their advisers should have reminded them all of the words of Walter Bagehot, writing about the institution of monarchy back in the nineteenth century: "Its mystery is its life. We must not let daylight in upon magic." But over the past decade, they've not just been letting daylight in. They've been letting the floodlights in, and it's now too late to stop. How the Windsors must now envy the Thai royal family, who simply put the shutters up decades ago, and have never let the cameras get within a hundred miles of their regal boat races, nor do they ever utter so much as a syllable in public. After all, it's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
So let those who wish to do so enjoy the Queen's Christmas Message, along with their Sky Gods and their Baby Jesus, but personally I don't like all that spiritual nonsense interfering with my consumerist Yuletide. In fact, I've decided that Christmas isn't getting commercial enough, so I am about to launch a new Christmas product, a handy range of disposable canines, and the advertisements will be running on the tv throughout December. You see, the RSPCA has been insisting for years that "a dog isn't just for Christmas," so I carried out some genetic research and successfully bred a corgi puppy whose life span is only twenty-four hours. "The Puppy Who is Just For Christmas" (tm) retails at £19.99, doesn't need feeding, is cute and yapless, and is guaranteed to die of natural causes by Boxing Day morning, just when your kids have got bored with pulling his tail and setting him alight. Never was the expression "every dog has his day" so appropriate.
