It’s quite the while since I was on my high horse and it seems appropriate to mount up again.
One cannot help noticing that QEII is now a nonagenarian, and a sprightly one at that. I sometimes wonder whether she has decided to outlive the heir presumptive and reduce him to an asterisk in the family history, never having forgiven him for marrying that upstart Diana, the daughter-in-law who outshone QEII’s own family, and then poor Camilla whose tampon (according to contemporary reports) he wished that he could replace-such a princely ambition.
As an octogenarian and putative centenarian myself, I wish the old dear what I wish for myself, viz., happiness and good health in our remaining moments.

There is something Mikado-esque about that last sentence; as I recall it, Nanki-poo, heir presumptive to the throne of Japan, was masquerading as a wandering minstrel to escape the amorous attentions of Katisha, an aging courtesan. His wanderings brought him to the town of Titipoo, where the action is staged. Our hero is searching for the one he loves, “a schoolgirl named YumYum.” At some point he is unfortunately sentenced to death by beheading for the crime of flirting. The sentence is to be carried out in one month by Ko Ko, the Lord High Executioner which inspires a song by Pooh Bah, the snooty Lord High Everything Else, in which he exhorts Nanki-poo to enjoy “Long Life to You -’til Then!”. The Mikado is W.S.Gilbert’s comic satire on politics and institutions in Victorian Britain; what a whale of a time he would have today!
Meanwhile QEII sails on, “long to reign over us” to quote the National Anthem-another of my pet peeves (more on this another day), and long she has done so. I remember the day, as I remember that day when JFK was shot. It was in April 1953, I was a sixth former at Chesterfield Grammar School and the Headmaster, a man named Glister, called a special assembly at which he announced that the king had succumbed to his illness and his daughter Elizabeth was now queen. As it happened she and hubby Phillip were in Kenya at the time of her accession accepting the adulation of her new subjects of color. The special assembly ended in the way all assemblies ended, with teachers and boys (no girls at this school) singing “Jerusalem”, William Blake’s weird paean to England and Anglicism. From that day to this she has reigned over the Brits and a bunch of other dominions, whether they liked it or not!

But as usual I digress.
The lady monarch has an ever-expanding family which is now in the 4th generation, with the latest additions being sired by William (dubbed work-shy Will by irreverent members of the normally respectful press corps), and thus the total number of persons regarded as being royal grows.
This word royal has always mystified me; my dictionary tells me that it reflects the status of a king or queen or their family, thus QEII is clearly royal, as is Charles her son and her three other kids, all having royal blood (and the unearned rank and station that go with it) coursing through their veins.
However, our biological colleagues have convinced us that blood is a fluid whose sole task it is to carry oxygen to those parts of our body that require it-as simple as that. Blood does not convey any physiological, psychological, or any other-ological property to our corpus; this is the job of our genes. Charles, a son of QEII, begat a son (William) with a commoner (Diana Spencer) and William begat a son (George) with a commoner, Katherine Middleton, thus George, a future king, has but one eighth of the gene pool of QEII, or put another way, George’s genetic make up is 87.5 % similar to that of a commoner such as myself. Thus, discounting the “royal jelly” hypothesis that I proposed in an earlier posting, and assuming that there isn’t a super-dominant gene for passing on royal status, then George and his sister will be hard put to produce babies that can be convincingly called royal. No matter how many comic-opera titles you slap on them, commoners are always commoners.
I started this essay with the intent of discussing the progress of British Republicanism, but I abandoned it because it was more fun to dig at the royals. Although I must admit to toying with the thought of English ladies in their twin sets knitting at the guillotine and cheering as the heads rolled-which brings us nicely back to the Lord High Executioner.