I love the sound of breaking china

Apologies for the incoherence of this post, and the fact that it’s cobbled together from thoughts I’ve expressed on various other media over the past 24 hours. It’s just that I’m rather surprised at the visceral rage provoked within me by the news that Prince William and Kate Middleton are now engaged. No, scrub that. I’m not angry that they’re engaged. I hope they have a pleasant wedding and enjoy their life together; they’ve never, so far as I know, done anything bad to me or mine. And if people want to have a day off and wave a few flags because two people they don’t know are getting hitched, well, it’s no dafter an excuse than the FA Cup final or Eurovision.

No, what’s really been pumping up my blood pressure has been the media coverage of the announcement, from the mid-market tabs’ attempting to shoehorn St Diana into everything, via the Waikato Times’s interview with someone who happens to be called K Middleton to  Lady Antonia Fraser’s remark on Radio 4’s Today programme that Ms Middleton (Marlborough, St Andrews, offspring of millionaires) is “not privileged”. If, as the conspiracy nuts might suggest, the whole thing is a ploy to distract us from the utter shitbucket into which the world economy is falling, it’s a dismal failure. If we’re seriously looking at SIX MORE MONTHS of this twee banality, this crazed desperation to pump every spare crevice of our consciousness with vacuous, inane, royal-scented non-news, then for every fire extinguisher chucked off Millbank Tower there’ll be a newspaper editor and a couple of TV executives following it down to the pavement.

An awkward young man once said: “I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused.” Sorry, but I’m still at disgusted.

PS: Love and Garbage says much the same, albeit with less screaming.