king ralph

It's been quite a while since I last posted - a combination of being busy with stuff that isn't interesting to write about and a general lack of inclination.

Some strange things happened last weekend, however. I was best man at a friend's wedding, which gave me a lot to think about, and I may post about that, but I was in a distant frame of mind as I was driving home along the M6 on the Sunday, which may partly explain why, for a short while, I seriously believed there had been a disaster involving most of the royal family.

I don't spend much of my time thinking about Liz and her relatives (though I'm vaguely aware of the visit by Anne to our fair city in a few weeks' time), so when a convoy of six police vans and cars suddenly sped past on the opposite carriageway with their lights flashing, I assumed that there must have been a major crash and continued on my way.

Shortly afterwards, however, my car radio was interrupted, as it's set to do, by a traffic bulletin from another station. The little display on the radio read only "traffic info", so I couldn't tell which station was responsible.

Instead of an announcer's voice, though, they started to play the national anthem. Had a member of the royal family died, I wondered. I wasn't aware that any of them were ill.

Then the anthem's second verse started. That's rarely played these days. It must be something serious. Perhaps more than one had died, then. Were the police vehicles rushing to the scene of a terrorist attack? The verse rolled on. Had the royals foolishly all gathered in one place in a rare moment of mass vulnerability?

Eventually, when the music ended, a voice bizarrely started spouting some urban street poetry. Then the 'traffic bulletin' ended and the radio returned to whatever I had been listening to. I'm certainly not disappointed that nothing serious had happened, but it was an odd few minutes followed by a definitely unsettling feeling of anticlimax.