Driving along in the car on a pleasant evening earlier this week, I was happily humming along to the toe-tapping sounds of the sadly defunct deathcore stalwarts Anal Prolapse, when my wife leaned over and turned the CD player off and the radio on. Those smug and portentous pips sounded.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ I asked, outraged.
‘I want to know if she’s had it or not,’ my wife replied.
‘If who’s had what?’
‘Kate. The baby.’
‘Why?’
There was no answer to the why, from my wife or, it seems, the rest of the country. No answer to the why from the beaming gumbeys camped outside the hospital with their home-made Union Jack hats and mobile phones held aloft, the modern form of tribute from our quiescent underclass. Nor from the jabbering reporters endlessly telling us in every news bulletin that there was no news whatsoever to report, but that this was still nonetheless the lead story of the day, the fact that there was no news to report. Still less from the features editors, itching to release their 52-page ‘Young Woman Has A Baby’ souvenir edition and terrified that it might clash with their 48-page ‘Very Ill Elderly Black Man Dies’ souvenir edition, both having been on the stocks for the past six weeks. Nelson is stoically holding out, though, so that problem has been removed from the fevered minds of the newspaper execs.
It is at times like this — much as it was at the time of the death of Princess Diana — that I feel estranged from the country, nay, the world. Hell, the Canadians turned Niagara Falls blue. Thank the Lord it was a boy, then — a vast psychedelic pink river might have made the entire population of Buffalo spontaneously vomit.
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