The Royal Family

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Mark Albrighton said:

Completely unscientific and at best an anecdotal indicator…what’s the bunting/flags/pictures of Charles people have put up in their front window situation near where you are?

And I’m only talking about households. Not pubs, shops, village halls, community centres. I think they typically do that sort of thing anyway, they may feel somewhat obliged to do so, dare I say.

My estimate for where I am is about 4-5% of households have put up some sort of decoration to mark the coronation.

My Neigbour has, he’s an armed forces guy, kind of simple. So I’ve decided to stay with my partner this weekend and we are spending the day out

[Rugeley Villa]

What’s up with being proud to be British ?  It’s like it’s frowned upon now .  It really doesn’t harm anyone. 

[Seat68]

My street is going for it, was going to do a protest at the street party but apparently there is low tolerance for those shenanigans. Will wait for @Follyfoot to come over for football and boo his kid as recompense.

[bickster]

5 minutes ago, Dodgyknees said:

So I’ve decided to stay with my partner this weekend and we are spending the day out in that London

Outed  

[villa4europe]

19 hours ago, tonyh29 said:

I get what the poster is trying say even if his analogy may be a strange one 

I don’t think he’s arguing you can’t be against the royal family , just the derision aimed at those that want to go see such an event  and camp on the streets of London .

why do we feel the need to sneer just because people have a different opinion , is the message he was looking for (I think )

to be fair i have cynical opinion of anyone who goes to those extremes for anything, you want to watch the parade or whatever fair enough, you want to camp out on the streets wearing union jacks for 3 days in order to do so....or you want to see madge's coffin again fair enough but you want to queue 18 hours to do so....its the extremes that are weird not the principle of what you want to do

im obviously a massive villa fan but like if you said to me villa are in the FA cup final tickets are on sale saturday lets go queue up outside the ticket office on wednesday id think you were mental

i would also argue that the royal family is also largely completely avoidable....including the argument that your tax pennies go to them, there are very few people who care enough to understand where their tax money goes, you dont like the royals and are offended you pay for them.....you pay more for the church of england

[bickster]

1 minute ago, villa4europe said:

you pay more for the church of england

You really don't want me to start on that too do you?  

 

[villa4europe]

4 minutes ago, bickster said:

You really don't want me to start on that too do you?  

at least here i get to opt out but i moved from bonn in north rhine westphalia where it was a flat 30 euro a month to rhineland pfalz where its 9%!

there was a decent sized tick in the no thanks box

[Genie]

18 minutes ago, Rugeley Villa said:

What’s up with being proud to be British ?  It’s like it’s frowned upon now .  It really doesn’t harm anyone. 

Unfortunately the union jack and other flag waving was hijacked by racist brexiteer types which has ruined it for everyone else.

If I see someone in my street with a flag out I’ll assume they are racist and thick.

[tonyh29]

1 hour ago, bickster said:

I think that gives you the title of Chief Flag Shagger

that's better than the title  " You lazy old sod  " that the wife gave me for not taking them down yet 

 

( tbf they flutter around in the wind  and scare the pigeons away , which is mainly why I've kept them up , poxy things crap everywhere and the cat is rubbish at chasing them away   )

[Guest]

39 minutes ago, bickster said:

Outed  

Can’t help it, I’ve tugged off over Truss, so why not Camilla!?

[Mark Albrighton]

1 hour ago, Rugeley Villa said:

What’s up with being proud to be British ?  It’s like it’s frowned upon now .  It really doesn’t harm anyone. 

I think if you want to feel proud of your country of origin, wherever that may be then fine, whatever. I would politely remain quiet speaking to someone wearing an outfit in the design of another country’s flag as I would someone wearing a union flag suit. My private thought would likely be I’d find them both somewhat daft, but I wouldn’t ridicule them as such.

I neither feel proud or ashamed. I don’t take a personal pride in the various British-centric achievements. They weren’t my doing.

Nor do I feel personally ashamed about various British-involved atrocities. They weren’t my doing either.

I also think that that people who are patriotic think people who are unpatriotic hate their country. No, not really. Just don’t love everything about it unconditionally. I’m pleased that I live here than a lot of other countries if that makes some happy to hear. I think it could have done better over history and I think it could do better now.

While I’m not patriotic, I find it a little bit sad that here it’s reasonably well entwined with the adulation of an embarrassingly wealthy family that you’re also meant to revere. If patriotism was geared more towards Jenner, Wilberforce, Wollstonecraft and their ilk rather than the usual Churchill, Nelson, The Royal Family…it might be more of an interest. 

But I’m not totally daft, I know people typically get more passionate (and defensive) about Kings, Queens and people involved in wars rather than medical pioneers and writers about women’s rights.

[tomav84]

58 minutes ago, Genie said:

Unfortunately the union jack and other flag waving was hijacked by racist brexiteer types which has ruined it for everyone else.

If I see someone in my street with a flag out I’ll assume they are racist and thick.

add twitter profiles to that. a union jack in their profile will usually be full of gb news retweets

[tonyh29]

Royalty and Marmite … could end up being the most unpopular thing on VT  today unless @blandy can come up with a fish and gravy royal portrait 

[Rugeley Villa]

2 hours ago, Mark Albrighton said:

I think if you want to feel proud of your country of origin, wherever that may be then fine, whatever. I would politely remain quiet speaking to someone wearing an outfit in the design of another country’s flag as I would someone wearing a union flag suit. My private thought would likely be I’d find them both somewhat daft, but I wouldn’t ridicule them as such.

I neither feel proud or ashamed. I don’t take a personal pride in the various British-centric achievements. They weren’t my doing.

Nor do I feel personally ashamed about various British-involved atrocities. They weren’t my doing either.

I also think that that people who are patriotic think people who are unpatriotic hate their country. No, not really. Just don’t love everything about it unconditionally. I’m pleased that I live here than a lot of other countries if that makes some happy to hear. I think it could have done better over history and I think it could do better now.

While I’m not patriotic, I find it a little bit sad that here it’s reasonably well entwined with the adulation of an embarrassingly wealthy family that you’re also meant to revere. If patriotism was geared more towards Jenner, Wilberforce, Wollstonecraft and their ilk rather than the usual Churchill, Nelson, The Royal Family…it might be more of an interest. 

But I’m not totally daft, I know people typically get more passionate (and defensive) about Kings, Queens and people involved in wars rather than medical pioneers and writers about women’s rights.

I’m not particularly patriotic myself. In all the doom and gloom though, let them fly their flags it is Britain after all isn’t it? 

[blandy]

3 hours ago, Genie said:

Unfortunately the union jack and other flag waving was hijacked by racist brexiteer types which has ruined it for everyone else.

If I see someone in my street with a flag out I’ll assume they are racist and thick.

Round here, it's probably 25% with the Kinging flags and streamers out. Of the ones in the street I know, none of them are racist thicko types. And co-incidentally, though it's a Tory area more widely, the elections today "we" didn't vote for Tories and 2 independents took the 2 seats, which was nice.

The other thought on this is that putting out red white and blue Kinging triangles and buntings, if it claims it back a bit from the EDL throbby types, then that's nice. They mostly do the England one, though don't they? - the red cross on white background, whatever that's called - St. George's cross, is it?

[Mark Albrighton]

2 minutes ago, Rugeley Villa said:

I’m not particularly patriotic myself. In all the doom and gloom though, let them fly their flags it is Britain after all isn’t it? 

In case it wasn’t clear, I wasn’t complaining about people putting up bunting. Although admittedly it is not something I would do. There’s no actual criticism in my post.

I was trying to find out how representative where I live was in terms of households putting up decorations to mark the of the coronation. I estimate about 5% of households here have decorated their house in some way and I wasn’t sure if that was high or not. It doesn’t feel like the locals as a whole have gone nuts about it, but I wanted to gauge some anecdotal information from other parts of the country before fully committing to that conclusion.

As an aside, for some time I have been wondering if decorating post boxes with a knitted item on top of it is something that is happening just here or elsewhere in the country. This has been happening for a year or two now. Often for royal stuff, a knitted crown will appear on it, but there was something for Easter. The just appear and disappear without warning. I’ve been meaning to raise it on here for a while but I was reluctant to on the off chance that IT IS just round by me and everywhere else in the country have their post boxes undecorated and everyone would wonder what the hell I was on about.

[Genie]

2 minutes ago, blandy said:

Round here, it's probably 25% with the Kinging flags and streamers out. Of the ones in the street I know, none of them are racist thicko types. And co-incidentally, though it's a Tory area more widely, the elections today "we" didn't vote for Tories and 2 independents took the 2 seats, which was nice.

The other thought on this is that putting out red white and blue Kinging triangles and buntings, if it claims it back a bit from the EDL throbby types, then that's nice. They mostly do the England one, though don't they? - the red cross on white background, whatever that's called - St. George's cross, is it?

I agree. I’ll assume those with the flags out are racist but of course many are not. It’s a shame that it’s just a natural association that’ll take a bit of time to work its way out.

 

[chrisp65]

Still one house from the 200 in my street, no change whilst I was out.

@Mark Albrighton yarn bombing is popular all over, they’re mad for it round here but its mostly clangers and hearts

[Davkaus]

The only family with bunting up on our street are the lovely middle aged god-botherers, who go full flag-shagger with the slightest excuse. They're trying to organise a picnic which I think will get a bit of a tragic turnout

[Lichfield Dean]

Anybody been down Sutton New Road in Erdington? There is some rather sad looking bunting draped around the central reservation car park. Looks homemade, probably sewn out of old clothes or something, and not even brightly coloured clothes.