On the meaning of a coronation (if it indeed means anything).
 | By Louise Loftus Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
I had to buy bread the other day. At the supermarket in Glasgow, where I live, there was some sad-looking coronation bunting near the registers that told me to "Party Like Royalty," which seemed to involve paper plates and cups with Union Jacks on them and a double-decker bus made out of cardboard that holds cupcakes ("colours may run when wet"). |
Scotland is perhaps a special case. But I think it's fair to say that the mood in most of Britain ahead of the coronation of King Charles III is somewhat underwhelmed. A YouGov poll in April asked more than 3,000 people how much they cared about the coronation: 9 percent cared "a great deal," 64 percent cared "not very much" or "at all." |
In fairness, it's been a difficult period. Inflation is high, wages are not keeping up and there have been strikes, on and off, for months. The National Health Service has not recovered from the pandemic. And Britain, post Brexit, is simultaneously confronting an uncertain future and a past that's the subject of heated debate. |
"This is the complex, polarized moment that Saturday's ceremony must try to meet," Hannah Rose Woods, a cultural historian, wrote in an essay earlier this week. |
"For Charles III, Saturday is the first big test of whether he can helm a modern, pared-down monarchy that is relevant — or at least not objectionable — to the majority of Britons," Woods writes. "St. Edward's Crown weighs almost five pounds. That's a lot of weight on one man's shoulders." |
For David Lammy, a Labour member of Parliament and the shadow secretary of state, Charles III still has an essential role to play in modern Britain. Lammy's parents came to Britain from Guyana, and Lammy writes movingly in an essay published today about what the monarchy meant to his late mother. She would use royal events as an opportunity to bring family, friends and neighbors together in Tottenham, the neighborhood in north London where Lammy grew up, for tea parties where the tea was poured from a royal-themed teapot. "My mother felt like the monarchy folded her and other immigrants like her into Britishness," he writes. "Saturday is a tea party for a country that sorely needs it." |
For Tanya Gold, who has written about the royal family many times for Times Opinion, Saturday is an opportunity to take the rule of primogeniture to a perhaps irrational, but very funny, conclusion. In a feature, she asks: Why this Charles? When there are so many other Charleses who might be King instead. Like Charlie Sheen, or Charles Xavier. |
Why this Charles, indeed. Gold's essay is a timely reminder to indulge in another hallowed British tradition this weekend: not taking ourselves too seriously. |
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