What King Charles gets wrong

Marooned in London for a day between meetings, I walked for miles in an attempt to find something good to say about the city. This was not a wholly unsuccessful expedition – those Nash terraces have an allure, Regent’s Park has been cutely de-manicured to encourage the wildlife and it was possible to buy a plastic replica of Big Ben almost every 15 yards, which came in handy. It was the Londoners I found problematic. Smirking rat-faced hipsters and man-bunned bike dweebs, buzz-cut, granite-headed lezzas, the performative callisthenics of middle-class thirty-somethings who believe they will never die, Arabs flogging tat every five paces, lithe, snake-hipped homosexuals having a pleasant lunch of kale with yeast extract at one of a million cafés with the word ‘plant’ somewhere in its name, overconfident, braying gap-year yankees, Afghans driving Uber cars as if they were in the Lashkar Gah Grand Prix, desperate, half-dead, joggers, young white businessmen jabbering to themselves like psychos as they stepped over the sprawled bodies of dozing Romanian beggars. London – all of human life is here. Except the good bits.

There were, to my slight surprise, plenty of Union Flags on display, although I couldn’t work out if this was for the tourists or to remind the locals of King Charles’s forthcoming big bash. Coronations have become a once-in-a-lifetime event, but even outside London, where both tradition and the monarchy have more of a pull, there seems to be little appetite for celebration. There are no street parties planned in my little northern town and I know of nobody who is planning a trip to London to watch the proceedings. That might be simply because everybody is skint, but I don’t think so.