Originally Posted by
Taunton Blue Genie
The 'Royal Family' are in a cleft stick. On the one hand they are semi-deified and on the other they try to come across as less stuffy and remote than their predecessors as that is a risk too. I, for one, will never bow unilaterally to another person on this planet and I consider the concept of royalty as ludicrous - even more so when it makes someone the Head of State merely due to the bed they were born in.
Please don't respond by saying that it gives us stability and that it's better than having a US president as, for example, Germany's Head of State (and which is not a lifelong position) is not the same position as the Chancellor - and I consider Germany to be pretty stable.
Having Heads of State who can't even enter a supermarket or walk the streets as normal human being is rather amusing. We defer to someone in their ivory tower who never attended a state school unless they were surrounded by an entourage (the smell of fresh paint in their nostrils as they sweep through), never uses public transport, never pops into a high street restaurant, café or pub, people kow-towing to them everywhere they go and referring to them as 'Your majesty' and the like at every juncture. For me, like religion, royalty infantilises us. As for the miserable dirge 'God Save The Queen' you have a double whammy of it in four words.
Needless to say, some of the younger royals (whose English is less clipped, archaic and alien than that of her Maj) do seem to have more contact with the real world and find that acting the semi-deified role at the same time is too much to bear.