William's Epiphany

Prince William came to New Zealand on an official visit this week. A couple of days before I had watched a TV clip in which Flight Lieutenant William Wales came briskly forward in a thoroughly military manner to receive his flying wings (I think on this occasion flying helicopters) from his father, Charles, Prince of Wales. William was already commissioned as a lieutenant in the Blues and Royals, Household Cavalry – serving with his brother – and, two years later, he earned his wings by completing pilot training at Royal Air Force College Cranwell. Last year the Prince transferred to the Royal Air Force, was promoted to flight lieutenant and is training to be a full time pilot with the Search and Rescue Force. Prior to all this he is a graduate of St Andrews University.

William had the grace, style, and clear common sense, to carry off that possibly embarrassing moment in front of his mates, smoothly and with aplomb. He and his father could effortlessly combine dignity and humour.

You have to admire a young man who is already a qualified airman, to say nothing of other achievements, from polo to coping with the hideous media. Yes indeed, I know, both he and his also talented brother Harry are hugely privileged people. They still had to prove themselves and pass exams, and win the trust of their mates, in the real world. All of this is entirely lost on sad commentators such as Brian Rudman in the NZ Herald, who probably couldn’t fly a kite.

However! what do we do now with William when he comes to NZ representing his grandmother the monarch, to open our new Supreme Court building in Wellington? This new building, for all its silly design, does matter because the NZ Supreme Court replaces our long reliance on the Privy Council as the final recourse in law. Well, we parade William around the obligatory hakas, hangis, barbecues... god help us all... across to Kapiti Island to be photographed with a kiwi... and of course through the children’s ward at the hospital, very nice.

We subject him to hordes of screaming silly orgasmic females in the Wellington streets. Where do we get these dreadful people, whose minds, if that is the word, never rise beyond their perception of celebrity, and ritual fantasising? We saw one little girl, Jacinda, hideously disfigured by Pink Disease, who said it was the greatest moment of her life. She was all of 10 years old, but that’s what you say to the media now when you’re on the fast track to fame and celebrity. Behind her was her awful mother, also pinked out, who said they would remember this all their lives. My kids used to have a word for that: “Double Yugghh...!!” Sometimes they would stick their fingers down their throats. I discouraged that.

There was one real moment, I thought, at the National Shrine in Wellington, the tomb of the Unknown Warrior, a very, very moving place. This fit, handsome, qualified young man, who knows as much as most of the people present about war and weaponry and loss, stepped up, laid a wreath, stepped back. That sort of gesture takes my breath away. It is not simply that he has learned to carry through a formal, ritual function. Neither is it that William of Wales has history built into his genes. It was that he is real, himself – that is what he seems to have inherited from his generation, and which people like Jacinda and her mother will never know.

Meanwhile the pathetic media bleated on about how well or otherwise William was performing on the Celebrity level – and worse, so help me, about whether we should become a republic. Ye gods. This is now the abyss of the media, that we “interview” people randomly encountered in the street about complex questions Plato wrestled with.

We now go to our reporter in Queen Street. “Excuse me, sir, should we become a republic?”

“Huh..? what..? eh..?”

“What do you do for a living, sir, if I may enquire?”

“I’m a bank executive...”

One of the miracles is what this young man has overcome. He seems to have emerged intact from a spectacularly dysfunctional family, back to Henry VIII. Bullies, psychopaths, sadists, nymphomaniacs, simpletons... His mother, a beautiful woman, driven to distraction, separated from her husband and the culture of the Windsors, died violently in a Paris underpass with her current lover.

I don’t know why we have a “royal family”. Does a country need one family that special? We got the Windsors from the Hanovers, from the Stuarts, from the Tudors, from the Plantagenets... In that movie The Queen, at the height of the Diana’s death crisis, the two queens, Elizabeth and her ageing mother, go walking through the garden at Balmoral, and Elizabeth the Queen Dowager says to Elizabeth the Queen, “You go back 1000 years. Remember your vow....”

Well I honour that too. It was a sincere and very solemn and public vow from a remarkable young woman at that time, and I suppose that’s why we still have a royal family. Does NZ have to have one? We could honour all that history and let it go. I would be sad – although we could much easier do it than England could. Scotland and Wales, even Ulster, might feel that way too.

The main argument against a republic, it seems to me, is who would lead it. The USA does not inspire confidence. Neither, I may say, does the imminent race to decide who will be Lord Mayor of the new Auckland Supercity. It’s chilling.

But William did well. He is a hopeful, talented, poised, handsome, thoughtful young man. And may he not be repressed and ruined by the Establishment. He could just be the one who resets the boundaries of monarchy and republicanism, to say nothing of leadership and decency.

Heat and Feet

Mary left for Brisbane this morning, to spend 4-5 days with Rhys, Grace, Boaz and Lauren, in their new house at New Beith. So I have this time on my own, to revert to my default mode of hermit. It also means that I can buy some cream to enjoy with summer fruit.

This meant a swift trip to the New World supermarket at Warkworth, city of the brain dead – not Warkworth, the supermarket. Where do these people come from? I parked next to some unregistered wreck, bald tyres, doors fastened with filthy cord... And inside the supermarket were the owners, resplendent in grubby bare feet, torn shorts and filthy singlet, hairy tattooed shoulders, matted unkempt hair, yellowed teeth – and that was only the wife. The bloke was worse. The kids were, well, indescribable. It would have been good to call the health department, but where would they start?

I object to bare feet and horrible human specimens where I buy food. People simply too dozy to be clean, sanitary, more or less presentable. This is the Kiwi “Good Keen Man” Syndrome, popularised in the 1960s by Barrie Crump, who shot deer and pigs and beat his wives.

Human feet in any case are not normally a pretty sight, and it astonishes me that some weirdos seem actually to find them erotic. I recall being at some retreat long ago where one of the leaders, unable to cope with silence and stillness, and looking for things to do, suggested a communal foot-washing ceremony. Ye gods. I said I had no affinity with feet, and received the immediate thanks and relief of several other leaders. Perhaps that is the point of the Jesus story – that feet are such ugly things, especially one might presume, at that time to say nothing of now, Middle-Eastern feet, but he washed them all the same. OK. The Pope does it, with carefully screened and scrutinised and pre-washed feet. I prefer not. I take the point of John’s story, which is something much deeper and more precious than feeling we have to replicate it every time we’re spiritually bored.

But the bare-foot Kiwi Bloke ethos around here is pretty strong. The sound of their tractors, hauling boats to the boat ramp, back again, running their outboards... The uniform is shorts, singlet, bare feet, baseball cap – and they are usually an unedifying sight. The bloke next door runs his tractor out of the garage some mornings, just to drive it around the lawn and back again.

However, Mary is off to Oz. Melbourne and Victoria are currently having truly dangerous heat. So are South Australia and much of Western Australia, even Tasmania. But in other parts there are storms and floods. It’s all a bit dire. I think it’s OK where Mary is going. And of course bush fires are a terrifying fact of life and death now. You have to wonder what the future is in a land where the water seems to be petering out.