Diary

12 March 2011

Florence King opens her Diary

Being an English-American can be depressing. For years I thought about giving up my American citizenship and becoming a Brit to get my blood and my nationality lined up without the interference of a hyphen, but then something made me change my mind with a vengeance: Princess Diana’s funeral. I spent three stunned days staring at the TV screen and thinking My God, they’ve turned into us! It wasn’t England any more, just a sceptre’d loony bin set in a sea of rotting flora, a UK of Utter Kitsch where the crud de la crud built teddy-bear temples to a gilded hysteric who resembled nothing so much as Judy Garland with a title. I told myself that if I must live in a country where people who once tipped their hats now tipped the scales, I might as well stay home and save myself the trouble of remembering to look right instead of left to avoid an oncoming hug speeding up the wrong side of the road. My hyphen, right or wrong.

I now get my England fix from ‘Masterpiece Theatre’. I am as hooked on Downton Abbey as everyone else on both sides of the Puddle but I have bones to pick with the first series. Carrying the corpse of the Turk through the corridors in the middle of the night stopped just short of unintentional comic relief. Didn’t Julian Fellowes remember that the same thing happened in Fawlty Towers when Basil and Manuel put the dead guest into the wrong laundry bin? Then there is Countess Cora’s maid, O’Brien. Thinking she is to be discharged, she places a bar of soap — soap! — on the bathroom floor so the pregnant countess will slip and have a miscarriage. Which is what happens. And of course the foetus was male. That long arm of coincidence and the self-parodic touch of soap in a soap opera were jarring. Some predictions for the rest of the plot: Lady Mary will become the Florence Nightingale of the first world war, earning the respect of Mrs Crawley if not the love of Matthew, and Lady Sybil will become the consummate Bright Young Thing, modelled on the real-life avatar, the tragic Elizabeth Ponsonby.