Virtually elected

So the election has finally happened.  The Nation Decides said the poster advertising the Manchester Evening News last Thursday.  As a matter of fact, the Nation sort of went Hmmm.  Choice?  How about None Of The Above. The weird thing is that Gordo, (whose smile is easily one of the funniest things on TV – it clearly sneaks up on him when he’s not expecting it) is still at Number 10.   He moved in without being elected and, now his party has polled fewer votes than Dynamite Dave, he’s still not going anywhere.

The election coverage was a happy hunting ground for anyone with a sense of humour.  Jeremy Vine moved into a virtual world where he virtually paved the road outside Number 10 and only broke off to wander up and down a virtual staircase hung with virtual portraits of former leaders of hung parliaments.  Every time he spoke, red, yellow and blue lines shot out of his fingers like some sort of psychedelic Spiderman and, when it finally began to penetrate that Nick Clegg, far from sweeping to a comfortable second, was being sent back to the basket, a man in the studio worried himself stupid about when was the best time to Activate The Queen.

Now many cutting remarks have been made about the way the Queen waves.  True enough, it does have a faint air of the mechanical arm about it, but that’s a long way from suggesting that she’s been Activated.   My picture of her at the end of a long day Queening is that she kicks her shoes off and asks Philip to put the kettle on, not, as this startling image suggested, that the Duke of Edinburgh flips open a panel and presses the off switch.  Does the Queen have a standby button so she’s ready to be Activated at any time or is the plug removed entirely so she has to warm up?

I think we should be told.

On the domestic front, my old pal, Angela Churm came for the weekend and we celebrated by opening a bottle of champagne.  (Yo!  Love that noise as the cork comes out.)  Dom Pierre Pérignon, (who was my sort of monk) called out, the night he invented champagne, “Come quickly!  I am drinking stars!” He wasn’t, obviously a man to undersell his products.  Oddly enough, although he was a Benedictine, he didn’t invent Benedictine.  And why were we popping corks?   Because Angela had a TV show screened Wot She Wrote.  It was an episode of the mid-day soap, Doctors that we’d recorded and we watched it together, hence the champers.  It was an excellent episode and the good news is that she’s got a commission for another.  So that’s another bottle, then.  Glug!