Weddings

I have attended seven, maybe eight. Let me count. My uncle. My brother. My best friend. Two excellent friends and allies from graduate school. My wife’s brother. My wife’s lovely former roommate. A former student, now a friend. My father. So, ten. I was best man at two. Master of ceremonies at two. I killed, by the way. 

So, there’s a wedding of enormous significance in the offing. I am referring, of course, to the impending nuptials of my dear friend, Alison Hunter, and her partner Jonathon Stewart, who ranks very high on the list of immediately likable people I have met. What a wedding it will be. I am exercising hard to fit into my dress pants, and even cutting back on the red wine to make it so.  Damn you, Hunter. You couldn’t have made it August?

They’re getting married at the end of May.

Oh, did you think I meant some other wedding, readers? I do seem to recall reading in some 10th-rate gossip website, right below reportage of the latest DUIs by a succession of reality TV “stars”, that William, the grandson of Elizabeth Windsor (who some of you call “Elizabeth II”), a young man who seems to have emerged with some strength of character despite having an utter nitwit for a father and a media obsessed shopaholic for a mother, is shutting down a country this Friday in order to get hitched to his admittedly rather charming girlfriend, Kate Middleton.

One hopes that this goes better than some other recent royal marriages, but anyone with a sense of history and strategy would probably advise them to cut their losses and skip right to the mutually recriminating tell-all interviews and tell Kate to get her PR people working on a Weight-Watchers sponsorship now.

Unkind? Please - they can take it. They’re not ordinary folks. Some day, fellow Canadians, they will be your King and Queen, your heads of state, possessing authority, even if only symbolic authority, over you, and only because of an accident of birth. Merit need not matter. The fact that they are not Canadian does not matter. Canada’s future Queen has been chosen without so much as a Royal Tweet in the direction of Canadian voters.

Incidentally, religion does matter. Our Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees religious freedom, but our head-of-state must be Anglican, because of a law passed in Britain in 1701. And you thought we were an independent country. Silly Canadians.

I have a certain sympathy for Kate Middleton, who has an M.A. from a school that might actually show a modicum of integrity about handing them out. It is by now widely acknowledged that the allegedly “fairy tale” romance between William’s parents was as arranged as they come, but there seems to be genuine affection between William and Kate, who met at school. But she is now condemned to a life of paparazzi and tedious ceremony, and also to the duty of producing an heir (and a spare) to throne, an unfortunate child who will one day reign over the wreckage of the Commonwealth. In all probability, this won’t occur until sometime around 2070 or 2080 or so. You used to be able to count on monarchs to die in battle or by intrigue or of some wasting disease, as so many of the positively loathsome despots who have occupied William’s future throne did. Not anymore. Nowadays they run comparatively few risks (though hats off to Harry for his tour in Afghanistan) and have health-care plans that most of their subjects would die for.

Oh, come on now, Broad, you middle-aged grump. Let us watch the wedding. Let us be swept up by the pomp and circumstance. Let our spirits soar to the hymns. Let us draw solemn fortitude from what Churchill called "the long continuity of our institutions and empire". Let us shed a small tear.

Let us eat cake.