On the Coronation of King Charles III
May 6, 2023
ON the day of the Coronation, I check out the celebrations in my old home town in a run-down part of East Lancashire. I try to tell my sceptical family that observation does not equate to endorsement. And yet, I cannot quite withdraw my endorsement completely.
Criticised for accepting an invitation to the event, Nick Cave said earlier this week, “I am not a monarchist, nor am I a royalist…. What I am also not is so spectacularly incurious about the world and the way it works, so ideologically captured, so damn grouchy, as to refuse an invitation to what will more than likely be the most important historical event in the UK of our age.” He’s absolutely right.
I walk into Nelson, past the ducks gathering dutifully at the pond in Victoria Park and up the preposterously steep Carr Road, where most of the gardens seem to be overrun with dandelions. I walk up from behind the library and see the Accrington Pipe Band tuning up to prepare for the procession. I head into the town centre and see kids taking turns to have their photos taken in a throne erected outside Althams travel agency, beneath Nelson’s old town clock, which seems to have been frozen at 12 o’clock, Back to the Future style.
Monarchy, I find myself thinking, is not without its virtues if it creates this communal focal point in a town that hasn’t had much by way of community for decade after run-down decade.
An elderly town crier shouts “God Save the King” but elicits only a few muttered responses. The band then begins its march past the old Town Hall (which is festooned with Union Jacks as well as a poster urging “support for Ukraine”). It belts out old war standards like Pack Up Your Troubles and It’s A Long Way To Tipperary but doesn’t bother with the national anthem, which is left to the old Town Crier to sing by himself, a capello. Some people join in. A woman calls out: “I don’t know the words.”
With Poles and Pakistanis joining in to wave their little flags, everything seemed very multicultural, though it was all topped by a few dollops of good old-fashioned British embarrassment, with the lavishness of the ceremony not quite matching the bathos of Nelson’s neglected and derelict landscape, and the pervading feeling that this is (despite the lavishness) a pretty threadbare distraction from the real concerns facing the town, not to mention the country itself.
But this is not all or nothing. The shiny mummery of the coronation might be nothing more than a figleaf designed to conceal the corruption, the cost of living crisis and the creeping authoritarianism of the British state. But you don’t have to be a slavering imbecile of a monarchist to appreciate the historical heft of the day’s pageantry.
Every time I return home, I think I should pay tribute to it, and what it used to be. But it isn’t for me to lament everything that has changed and is still to change. I departed in a huff more than 20 years ago and it would be absurd to expect everything to have waited patiently until I returned in a better mood to appreciate it.
But here I was, listening to the Lord Mayor of Pendle, urging us to celebrate the flimflam and ancientry of a giant royal occasion in London, urging us to enjoy a coronation from a makeshift stage in front of a town centre that has already been readied for demolition.
