meish dot org: life, unfolding

I’ve spent a good chunk of the weekend systematically digitising a stack of old photographs, from my time at college in Western Canada. In the process of doing this, I have learnt several things.

1. Bad Hair
   Whoever told me I ought to get a perm was really very wrong indeed. I ended up looking as if should be wearing leather trousers and singing shouting in a soft-rock band. Even though this was the (very) early nineties, this was still inexcusable.

2. People Pictures
   I took a lot more people pictures back then than I do now. That’s possibly because there were more people in my everyday life back then.

   I know this might seem like an odd thing to say, living and working in the heart of a gigantic city, working in a building with five full floors, and with packed commutes twice a day.

   But I don’t mean those kinds of people - the peripheral people who happen to share your existance on the bus, in the coffee shop, next to the photocopier, in a meeting room. Back then, at a college of two hundred people on a small, wooded campus on the coast of Vancouver Island, those two hundred people were my everyday life.

   They were my friends, my room-mates, my fellow Physics-haters, my lunch dates, my kayak buddies, my classmates, my study partners, my random late night coffee on the deck outside the common room allies. They were my world.

   No wonder I had so many pictures of people - and not just people I saw and snapped - people I knew and loved and loathed (and loved then loathed, or vice versa in some cases) on an everyday basis. I took it all for granted back then, flung suddenly from innner London to a campus beneath towering trees, where two hundred students became family - with all associated joys and problems.

   Now they’re all over the world - or in some cases, just down the road - and nearly fifteen years have passed. It’s weird, is all.

3. Super, Natural, British Columbia
   Canada is just gorgeous. Really. All those towering trees and rocky shorelines. It’s like the West of Scotland on steroids.

   I lived in B.C. for two years, and explored a little by bus, by boat, on foot and in a kayak, but totally took for granted that I was living in one of the most breathtakingly gorgeous bits of the world. This totally sharpens my resolve to get out there in 2005 with P, possibly for our long-awaited honeymoon. And this time with a better camera.

4. Surprise!
   I’ve got this certain picture of me and an friend (who shall remain nameless). We’d just finished painting a mural on the common room wall, and we are sitting looking proud and paint-spattered on top of a piano in front of it. He’s wearing a baseball cap, and I’m wearing that terrible perm and a lumberjack shirt. Contrary to what the Monty Python crew might have you believe, that’s not OK. Now, I’ve had this picture for fourteen years, and it’s pretty small. Hold your thumb and forefinger about 3 inches apart. It’s about that big. So, pretty tiny, really.

   Anyway, today, in the process of scanning it, I discovered a detail in the photograph that I hadn’t previously noticed. See, the scanner automagically scans at large scale and high res. And so when I opened up the scanned image, imagine my surprise to discover that the white splodge between his legs that I’d previously noticed on the photo wasn’t, in fact, a blob of paint, but was in fact his underwear, peeking through a hole in his crotch. And then picture my further surprise when I spotted an unmistakable shadowy bollock, peeking out alongside. Niiiice.

5. Hello?
   The not-so-great thing about digitising pictures is that you inevitably end up in great swathes of reminiscence, such as to cause you to spend hours googling your old classmates. Why aren’t any of them online as more than just vague passing references, dammit? Is no-one wired these days?

Some of the pictures I’ve been digitising will appear in this flickr album. There’s one or two there already, in fact….

When was the last time you went out dancing? Or, for that matter, the last time you danced anywhere? Subtle foot shufflings at gigs only partially count. I’m talking dancing here.

I haven’t been out dancing for years. Literally, years.

I’m trying to remember the last time. Might have been at an office Christmas do in 1998, drunk on a boat. I remember being on the dancefloor, at least, but not actually boogying. But that could have been it.

If not then, it could have been a few years before at a dire student pub called the Queen of Hearts in Fallowfield, Manchester, with my good friend Niki, on a random off the cuff evening out. As I recall, we met up on a whim in Solomon Grundy’s on Oxford Road before heading off in search of somewhere to shake our tail feathers. It was a Tuesday night in mid-term, and nearly deserted. The handful of customers who were in were laddy, drunk and leary. We danced for an hour to classic 80s sounds, and then bored of the gropes, headed home.

When I lived and worked in Aberdeen, I went out dancing all the time. There wasn’t that much else to do in the summer, when all the students had gone home, except sit and drink. Of course we did that, too, but wallets and livers and 6am starts conspired to make that particular activity less enjoyable than it might otherwise have been. So instead of boozing all night, we’d fuel ourselves with a few pints of cider, or something equally cheap and liquid, and hit the dancefloor.

The Triple Kirks. Oh Henrys. The Lemon Tree. The Mudd Club. Cafe Drummond. The Blue Lamp. Live bands. Eighties nights. Grunge, rock, goth and dodgy tribute acts. A couple of drinks, a couple of friends and a dancefloor, and I was set.

Some of the happiest times of my life, now I think about it. We lived large and out loud. We didn’t care who was watching, we danced to anything, everything, with each other, alone, or anyone around.

In Bolivia, I’d gone out dancing often. Sometimes dreadful places, meat markets, with briqht lights and a deadly combination of latino and euro pop. Whigfield. Mana. Los fabulosos cadillacs.

Sometimes tiny dancefloors at the back of poky bars where a beer cost 12p and a ginebra y tonica cost a fiver. We stuck to fizzy lager and danced the night away to Bon Jovi, The Smiths and Crowded House.

In the Cochabamba business district, we discovered Helloween, the only bar in Bolivia with a be-quiffed Morrissey devotee behind the bar. We exploited his fondness by adopting cod-Manc accents and demonstrating that we could sing along to every word of every song, translating as we went. He repaid us by keeping the bar open until five and “How soon is now?” on the turntable.

In Seville, I danced bulerias, tango, sevillanas and salsa. I danced to Ini Kamoze, Snow and the Cranberries. In Sopa de Ganso, there wasn’t room to dance expansively, so we shuffled rhythmically with arms above our heads and collected carnations shoved in our cleavage.

I’ve danced - well, voqued, strictly speaking - in a club called Alcatraz in Puerta Vallarta, where the walls of the dancefloor were mirrored and the man(olo) i was dancing with spent most of the evening touching up his hair in his reflection over my left shoulder.

I’ve danced in clubs in Liverpool, to repetitive beats with a massive grin on my face. I’ve danced in my college common room, and in village halls. I’ve danced in random clubs, like The Cube in West London - a favourite indie/goth hangout in the late eighties - and big tents on fields. I’ve danced to just about anything you can imagine, music-wise. I’ve danced at weddings, birthdays, and even a funeral, but despite all this, I realise that I haven’t actually danced in years.

I wonder why?

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When I was about seventeen, and at college on the west coast of Canada, I wrote letters home. Email wasn’t an option (I think there was one computer at the college for students’ use, but it was a glorified typewriter, really, with no connectivity - and besides, even if we’d managed to dial up, in 1991 there wasn’t really anything to connect to). So I wrote home to my mum and sister - long missives on ruled paper stolen from my class notes folder, continuing in pages ripped from diaries and the back of photos and brochures - little snippets of everyday life, bundled up periodically - rather than being written in one sitting (I wasn’t organised enough for that) - and then sent home.

Except we were 10km from the nearest post office, and I could never remember to get a stamp. So I just kept writing and writing and writing until I would eventually get around to sourcing one.

Meanwhile, seven thousand miles away, my mum would periodically get increasingly worried. She hadn’t heard from me in months. She hoped everything was ok. Then, sporadically, out of the blue, she’d receive a bundle of scribbled paper - a twenty nine page missive written over six weeks or so. That would keep her busy for a while, and then weeks would pass and the worry would start again.

I think the thing was that I was in the habit of writing to her regularly - it just wasn’t getting through, because it wasn’t being posted. But the very act of writing felt as if it should have been enough. By writing pretty much every day, I was keeping in contact, mentally - telling them both all about what I’d been doing, and how it felt. The rest - the delivery - was just a matter of logistics.

The problem wasn’t in the regularity of writing, but in how often it was posted. I needed to remember that once I’d written it, it wasn’t yet *out there* - that required an extra step, too. And *that* was the problem. So when she complained that I wasn’t writing regularly, I was able to say “I am - you’re just not receiving it regularly”

Is there a difference?

When I was born, the doctor wasn’t there. In the maternity ward, the air was thick with humidity and women hollering for relief. My mum, self-trained in National Childbirth Trust breathing techniques, from a book sent over by her mum, remained relatively quiet, panting through the pain.

The doctor came to check on her and, when she saw how little pain my mum was apparently in, concluded that there was ages left to go before I made my entry. The doctor went shopping. Twenty minutes later, I popped into the world, protesting loudly.

My mum always said I was born within earshot of lions roaring, which always seemed fitting. If you’re going to be born in Africa, where better? The truth is, the lions were safely contained within the zoological gardens nearby.

Over the years, I’ve spent birthdays variously:

• sledging on teatrays in the Isle of Man;
• raising money for Comic Relief by standing outside BBC television centre with an enormous birthday card;
• eating dinner on top of a mountain, with a view over the Olympic mountain range, while serenaded by an opera singer;
• Getting my nose pierced in Vancouver;
• waiting for flowers in a run down tenament in Muirhouse;
• eating pancakes in Liverpool;
• dancing Sevillanas under orange blossom;
• in a moutain hut in North Wales, while people raved all night;
• eating welsh rarebit in a cafe-cum-bike-repair-shop in Liverpool, run by that bloke who used to be in Brookie;
• Having a shiatsu massage in a hut overlooking the Amazon treetops;
• on a rooftop in Soho;
• at work, and then in the pub.

Today, on my birthday, I’m getting ready to go on a three hour train journey northwards, closely followed by a three-hour train journey southwards. Every year brings new adventures, experiences and surprises. Every year is different, and new.

…in both time and distance: Long beach, BC.

Something that will always be characteristic of the west coast of Canada is the sight of logs washed up on the shore.

I loved the thought that these huge trunks had been felled and stripped and corraled behind a small boat, floating off on a journey to the mill, when suddenly, a rogue wave set them free. They drift dangerously for weeks, months, years, and then somehow become part of the landscape again, washed up on a quiet beach.

We arrived in the late morning, after a cold night in SeaTac airport, sleeping under bright lights to the accompaniment of automatic doors swishing open and shut, letting in gasps of snowy, frozen air.

Ten hours later, we were in another world, stepping off an Alaska Airlines plane into a wall of moist, hot, heavy air. Mexico.

We headed for the Hotel Vialta, picked at random from the Lonely Planet book.

We were students at the same college in Western Canada - friends, but not close. We knew each other well enough to plan an expedition together South of the border, down Mexico way, over the Christmas vacation - but not well enough to know what it would be like travelling together when we got there.

Today, rooting through a box of things I’ve been meaning to sort out for years, I found this photo of the ceiling fan in our room at the crumbling Hotel Vialta, in the old town of Mazatlan, where we stayed three nights for a couple of dollars each.

We’d been swimming in the calm pacific earlier in the day, and the air was so humid that our swimsuits refused to dry in the moist air. Geckos ran across the ceiling and down the walls. A family of cockroaches lurked in the dark bathroom. I hung my cozzie and sarong on the rickety fan to dry as it churned the thick air, slowly.

I also found the travel diary we kept throughout the trip. Re-reading it, I realise how many risks we took, how accepting and carefree - and stupid - we were. At eighteen, it didn’t even occur to me to worry.

I’ve written some of what happened here. More photos of Meg’s month in Mexico.

The best teacher I ever had, since you ask, was not one of the obvious ones.

I had some cracking teachers in college and university - Sylla (Spanish), Theo (English), Rosie (Sociolinguistics and Quechua) - in their own ways, each of them inspired me to learn, extending the student-teacher relationship into friendship (whether that meant eating chocolate fondue at their flat or lending favourite books and urging me to read them) and I have to thank them.

But the best teacher I ever had was not my favourite. She was a woman called Ms Stacke and she was not an easy person to like. At all.

Ms Stacke (I think her first name may have been Elizabeth) taught me geography for five years in secondary school. She had icy blue eyes, and white blonde hair pulled up in a tight chignon at the back of her head. She was probably late forties, early fifties, and she was so difficult to impress. It drove me crazy.

Without sounding big-headed, I was sort of used to being able to sail through classes on flukey essays and general knowledge. I didn’t feel particularly challenged by any of my GCSE subjects (except maybe physics, but that’s another story) and the whole school experience bored me. I did a few exams early, and yawned through the rest.

Ms Stacke, however, was hard to please. However good my essays, however flawless my projects and presentations, she always wanted more. I remember getting 97% in my GCSE Geography mock exam, and she badgered me about the other 3%, telling me I’d made a stupid mistake. She never once let her guard down, never once made concessions for anything or anyone, always expected more, always pushed me harder.

She’d travelled a lot, and her eyes lit up when she talked about the San Andreas fault, Crater Lake, Mount St Helens. She made me want to travel more, to understand how geography applied in the real world. She refused to allow me to be satisfied with my classroom, my city, my life. She made me itchy for more knowledge, more experience.

When I won the scholarship to study in Canada, she was over the moon, though she didn’t let on until a whole year later. I whizzed through my GCSEs, acing geography with the only perfect score in the country. Still she never said a word. Not “well done.” Not “good for you.” Nothing. I clenched my fists and left for Canada, where there was no geography syllabus, and I was forced to take Anthropology instead.

A few months into my time there, I sent Ms Stacke a postcard of the San Andreas fault, from a trip there. I’d seen geography in action, and I wanted to thank her for making me seek out the knowledge and the experience. She sent back a postcard from Bournemouth and a stack of maps of Canada, which she’d been saving for me. She’d taken early retirement. She’d left London. She was proud of me. Goodbye.

I have seldom felt so incredibly proud as I did then.

I remember having an argument with a friend prone to activism when I was studying in Canada all those years ago. He was always organising petitions, protests, rallies, demonstrations, hunger-strikes and whatnot, against logging, war, poverty, homophobia, whaling, environmental waste…you name it. If there was a cause, he was up in arms about it.

I was happy and eager much of the time to participate in the things he co-ordinated, and even took on some responsibilites myself, because I believed strongly in the causes involved. But the argument came about when one day we had organised a huge beach-cleaning operation around the southern tip of Vancouver Island, and had collected well over 40 tonnes of rubbish, with the help of an army of volunteers.

That night, we watched the news, to see the coverage of local Earth Day efforts - including our own, maybe - when the anchor handed over to Brad for the weather, without a mention of our enormous haul, my friend switched the tv off in disgust.

“Well, that was a waste of time” he grunted. My jaw dropped.

Our argument centred around his central belief that it is only worth doing something if people see you do it; if you get a soundbite on the news, a sidebar in the local paper, a public response from the governor. Otherwise, it was effort wasted.

I disagree. I don’t think that media response should be validation for doing something in the first place. I think that sometimes, doing it is enough.

If we pick litter off beaches, the coast is cleaner. If we write letters for amnesty, voices and opinions get heard. If we take placards down to a rally, and waggle them about, we create a public presence, an awareness. If we hand out leaflets, lend books, write articles, or talk with people, we educate them. Public action is not a means to an end, but an end in itself.

And in a funny way, kids, I feel like that about blogging. If it gets noticed or recognised, then great. I try and make these pages interesting, entertaining, accessible for everysurfer (like the quintessential everyman) but I don’t do it for recognition, media or peer or otherwise. I do it because I do it. If I write my head out onto this page, I do it for me, but I also take pleasure in the knowledge that I am adding to the web, in whatever small way.

The same is true of the academic papers I’ve published on the site - I do it for the permanent record it offers my words (and the chance to escape from more mounds of paper cluttering up my house), but also because I know that whatever is out there is accessible. If I can help someone finish a term paper on Bolivian Quechua drinking rituals, then great. If I show up in the bibliographies for theses about internet culture and community, fantastic. It’s been worth it.

When I’m blogging, or reading other people’s blogs, I am often reminded of a quote by Ani Difranco, writing about her music:

“I speak without reservation from what I know and who I am. I do so with the understanding that all people should have the right to offer their voice to the chorus whether the result is harmony or dissonance….Should any part of my music offend you, please do not close your ears to it. Just take what you can use and go on.”

I like that. Take what you can use, and move on.

A little over 7,700km away from where I sit writing this, a hundred people are gathering under tall trees for my college ten year reunion. I am not there.

It’s weird. Ten years ago (well, twelve if we include the years at PC) each of us at college reserved a little chunk of mind space for wondering what we’d be doing by the time the ten year reunion swung around - we knew about it even when we were attending, and we relished the thought of such a distant, exotic future point.

The Ten Year Reunion. It morphed into this gigantic, intangible thing that loomed distantly, shadowing our eventual departure from the college, and colouring our future plans. “By the ten year reunion, I hope to be… In ten years, I will… In a decade, I’m going to have…” It became a future marker, something to define ourselves and our activities by, something by which, by when we somehow needed to prove ourselves.

In the first while after college, as we embarked onto bigger adventures than we can possibly have anticipated at college, ten years seemed a long way away. 2002 was in a completely different century. We looked over our shoulders (Wistful? Relieved?) at the college experience, fading into the distance, and tried to live in the complicated now, wherever it found us - university, travelling, home, work.

Years passed and the reunion got closer, as the college experience got steadily further away. It became hard to believe that the looming distant reunion of the future was somehow closer now than the actual reality of us, there and young, idealistic, naive and complicated under the tall trees.

The reunion was creeping up. A few years ago when the year 2000 ticked over - that significant date which had loomed in our futures since childhood - I experienced a jolt of excitement and quasi-panic at the realisation that our own ten year reunion was actually just around the corner, chronologically speaking, and that there were only a couple of years left to achieve all those things we vowed we were going to, only a handful of months left to prove…. what?

Though it had no doubt happened before, it was at that point that some of us may have have realised that there is actually nothing left to prove - at least not to our college contemporaries, peers or faculty. We may have wanted to return to the college triumphant - educated, employed and settled, with beautiful child or partner (or both) in tow (Healthy, happy and succesful: isn’t that the dream?) but we probably knew, by summer 2000, that time had pretty much run out to do anything extraordinary, except continue to exist.

I wanted to go to this reunion, though I have had mixed feeling about it for a few months now. Despite misgivings, I had every intention of attending. But one thing and another has got in the way, and conspired to mean that I won’t be attending after all. So today, as strangers who were once friends gather under tall trees in western Canada to get re-acquainted and coo over wedding/baby pictures, new haircuts and highflying lifestyles, I’m here in London, trapped by work and health and ambivelance and lack of oomph, all of which make it difficult to travel at the moment for various reasons.

But I’ll be thinking of them under the tall trees: older, but still just as complicated.

For a decade, this reunion has been an identifiable milestone for those who graduated with me back then. But every day is a milestone. We have nothing to prove to each other now, except that we made it this far. When we left our little hothouse of education, emotion and experience, we thought we deserved a pat on the back for getting through two years of college, but the real congratulations and celebrations are for making it through the last ten, which must have been much more complicated, difficult, passionate, challenging and exciting than we could have ever hoped or feared.

In many ways, I’m sad to be missing the reunion, because it was a definite marker, something anticipated for such a long time. But in another way, philosophically (and the particular irony of that choice of word will not be lost on anyone who had to suffer my inane ramblings in Philosophy lectures back then) I’m sort of secretly glad I won’t be there, because sometimes it’s good to let things pass, especially those things we thought we would need to measure ourselves against; the events we turned into vast towering milestones.

In realising and recognising that these markers are not as enormous as we once believed, we turn them from stumbling blocks to stepping stones, on our way to the wider future.

Eleven years ago (eek!), I went to an international college in Canada, with two hundred students from eighty-seven different countries in attendence. I represented the UK, which was an oddity for someone who had never identified herself as being especially British before.

I was born abroad and brought up in Nigeria and in the heady racial and cultural mixing bowl of Notting Hill in the seventies and eighties. My family travelled often, and picked up bits of the cultures we encountered along the way. As a seven year old I could jabber away happily in seven or eight languages (wheras now I struggle with just one). I was (and still am) just me, not defined by my language or passport or nationality - at least not from within.

And so it came as a shock to represent a country I didn’t necessarily agree or identify with - politically, culturally, linguistically, historically - in front of the world. I’m not going to go into the whole nationality thing here, though there’s a lot to say about it, except to point out that for a lot of formal functions (special events, performances, concerts, fundraisers etc) all the students at the college were expected to wear national dress, to represent the rich cultural diversity of the institution.

Let’s just stop and think a minute, shall we. What exactly was I supposed to wear? Jeans? A Beefeater outfit? A Bowler hat? Morris Dancing costume? Er, none of the above. I had no costume.

So of course I improvised. In my first year I wore a sari a few times, then graduated on to a Kazakh waistcoat and hat and black polo neck (I was reading a lot of Satre at the time). At verious choir performances and fundraisers I was Polish, Basque, Pakistani, Texan, Norwegian. Often, after the performance, we met with the audience - and frequently, I simply could not be arsed to explain
a) that I was English (the person I would talking to would invariably say “Oh, do you know John Brown, from London?” which would force me to get evil and say “oh yes…terrible about the divorce, wasn’t it?” and watch their faces fall in horror…but that’s a different story) and
b) why I was dressed up in the Thai national costume. So I began to act. Well, okay, lie. If I thought I could get away with pretending to be from another country, then I would (of course, the irony that I actually was from another country was completely lost on me). So I would put on outrageous accents and swear blind that I was from Portugal, Italy, Iceland, Paraguay.

It was Paraguay that got me into trouble.

[I've always wanted to say that. Makes me feel like a spy.]

We were singing for some charity event at the Empress Hotel in Victoria. I was wearing the Paraguayan costume that I’d borrowed from a girl on my floor, and afterward, milling around with the audience and a cup of lukewarm tea, an old man came up and said “Hello, where are you from?”

I summoned my best outrageous accent and said “I yam frrrrom Parawaaay”

“De veras?” he asked “No me diga! Que raro! Trabajaba en Paraguay por unos trece años. De que parte eres?“

Gah. My face fell. I had found a flaw in my plan. The fact that I didn’t speak any spanish at all (apart from a few choice phrases) and understood even less. Like, in fact, none. At all. Eek. So I mumbled something about the coach leaving, and ran for the door, resolving next time to stick to my own nationality, whatever that nebulous item was.

Sure enough, ten months later, I managed to be British at another fundraiser. It was two years before the Commonwealth games were due to come to Victoria, and the international choir was again singing at some press junket fundraiser thing, providing local commonwealth-flavoured colour to what was essentially a royal visit by Prince Edward, patron of the Commonwealth games committee or something. The point being that we got on stage, sang a bit about world peace and jolly old international group hugs or something, and then afterwards, suddenly, instead of milling around with lukewarm tea and rapidly cooling enthusiasm with the audience, I was dragged into a line-up (a shaking-hands-with-royalty type one, not a police identification one - that’s another story…) to meet Prince Edward.

I was wearing a particularly horrible floral Laura Ashley type creation which I’d borrowed from a Canadian, and which made me look like a strangely camp american football player (I’d shaved most of my head in Mexico, a few weeks earlier, and the dress had enormous shoulderpads). I think it was supposed to look country-garden-ish, but it actually reminded me more of the sort of product pattern that would emerge if you gave Ermintrude a rather powerful emetic. I was also wearing stupid heels, which made me at least six foot tall. So picture a tall butch amazon in heels and a pool of floral vom, and you’ve pretty much got the picture.

Anyway, Prince Edward was working his way along the line-up, greeting people and exchanging a few words with them as he went. I always imagined (because I gave it soooo much thought) that royalty had a standard two or three lines which they used in rotation along the line-up, so it looked as if they were having new and original thoughts and covnersations the whole time, in much the same way as I used to play three songs when busking on Portobello Road - two songs was the optimum passing time for people who were walking slowly and browsing at the stalls, and three meant I avoided repetition, bumped out the set and didn’t have to bother expanding my repetoire. Besides, people only ever gave money for the Beatles or the Smiths anyway.

Edward got closer. I don’t care much for royalty, but that wasn’t the issue in this particular situation. My palms would have been equally sweaty if I’d been meeting my boyfriend’s parents, or an MP, or whatever. I’m prone to momentary gasps of nervousness just before I meet someone - even if it’s someone I already know, but haven’t seen for a while. I get a huge adreneline rush, my heart hammers in my chest, and I get a bit shaky - but it all passes within seconds, usually. As soon as I open my mouth, I relax and it’s all fine - I’m in my element taking control of strange situations, talking to people, making things work. As soon as the waiting is over, I’m fine, which is why I so detest people saying they’ll come over or call some time on saturday afternoon. I hate waiting, because it means that sense of anticipation, expectation, goes on far too long.

And now I’m making you wait for this story. Oops, sorry.

So eventually, Edward gets to me, and his Aide says “This is Meg Pickard, she’s a student at Pearson College. She’s the British one.” which is a funny old introduction, if you ask me - but he didn’t. So I stick out my hand, and then remember and do a little curtsey, though I feel like a complete and utter tube. He opens his mouth to say what I imagine is going to be the usual little bon mots or simple question, and then he says

“So, have you ever met royalty before?”

“No,” I reply, honestly, “this is my first time.”

“Ah,” he says, in his weird strangulated-plum accent, “what do you think of it so far?”

My brain goes into hyperactive WHAAAT THE FUUUUUCK mode. What kind of a dumbass question is that? What? Is there any kind of protocol for answering such a question, I wonder, and as I’m wondering, trying to formulate my response, I hear the words just sort of slip out.

“Well, you’re shorter than I thought,” I say, because he is, “and you’ve got less hair,” which he most certainly does.

All that’s going through my head at this point is that he’s a short, balding plummy little man, and I just insulted him and I really didn’t mean it, well, I did, but I didn’t mean it to come out like that and now I’m wondering whether they’re ever going to bring back hanging as a punishment for treason and/or insulting the royals.

He sort of snorts with laughter, and I wonder if he’s even heard me, and then he sort of raises one hand to smooth the back of his hair and says “Yes, I suppose I am…” at which point the aide grabs him by the elbow and firmly guides him to meet the old lady next to me, who is the chair of some committee or other, wearing an awful lot of cat-wee flavour perfume, and was fishing her knickers out of her crack three minutes earlier. She, of course, follows protocol to the letter, giving me a snooty glance as Eddie moves on to the next guest. She bloody would, because he didn’t ask her any unexpected questions, oh no. He asks her the equivalent of the busker’s Panic - safe, secure, everyone can sing along, no threat whatsoever - he asks her something about the weather, in other words, and she answers smugly. Silly cow.

So there we have it. My first and only brush with royalty, and I called him short and bald within the space of about thirty seconds. Bring on the queen mum, I say, I’ll bloody well ‘ave ‘er!

My brother gave Princess Di some lilies in his underpants, once, but that’s a different story entirely…..

Have you ever met royalty? Or made a protocol faux pas? Or said something embarrassing in public? Make me feel better. Please.