God bless you Ma’am.

Hello, sorry, I took a couple of days off. There was an incident involving too much alcohol and a snooze in a toilet on a train that you don’t need to hear about. The important thing to note is that it’s Tuesday, it’s exactly 9am and I’ve run two and a half miles this morning, which still isn’t that important.

I wanted to talk a bit about the jubilee celebrations. Firstly it should be noted that I’m a massive fan of shouting ‘smash the state’, talking about a new world order where we all just cuddle each other and I think that the royal family are a massive burden on my life (except Phil the Greek who is just the brilliant kind of awkwardly placed racist I can really get behind). Yesterday I went to a jubilee party which was cracking fun. I think in a few ways this weekend has brought out the best in people, it makes you appreciate the wonder of being British, whilst hushing up a lot of the nonsense in our lives/country/government, and sweeping it under the bunting. I don’t know if it’s because of the extra bank holiday (if you’re lucky enough to have an employer who recognises such things), or just because it makes people take stock of the fact that we’ve got a good thing going (yes that was an attempt to paraphrase Sid Owen) but everyone seems a lot more British this weekend.
I can’t say I’ve ever felt particularly British, which is probably partly down to my mongrel breeding and partly due to the fact that I could never place exactly what it meant, after this weekend I have concluded it means eating a lot of trifle, drinking a lot of Pimms and singing Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da too loudly whilst simultaneously cursing Peter Kay for using John Lennon’s middle name when introducing Paul McCartney to the stage outside Buckingham Palace. I can settle for this kind of British, it’s in my comfort zone. Sitting in my lounge last night with a cup of tea, a stack of sausage rolls and watching the jubilee concert really set it all into place for me. I’ve heard people today griping about the fact that they didn’t have whoever on at the gig but the problem is that heritage artists are the ones who truly celebrate what it means to be British. I don’t think a lot of ‘current’ artists have any longevity at all and that was reflected in the line up, it’s not T4 On The Beach, it’s a celebration of 60 years on the thrown and I think the variety was spot on. If you have an issue with it you can have words with velvet voiced Gary ‘bent over for a knighthood’ Barlow who organised it (apparently).

What I hope is that this weekend doesn’t end in terms of the spirit it has evoked, I hope we can have a faultless Olympics Summer and that we can get back to being Great.