No Photographs, Please.... We're Royal

Acute Mourning Sickness

I am in bed.  I have been so for more than a week.  The death of Larry Hagman has laid me low, and were it not for a serious lack of Bupa I would be in a private hospital.  A cute mourning sickie they call it.  Terminal Dynastic Syndrome.  I could not go on.  A world without JR.  How could that be?

I have been infected with a worldwide virus.  Somehow someone none of us knew has affected all with deep superficiality.  OK someone shot JR.  But someone shot JFK and then Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald and then James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King and then two months later Sirhan Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy, and then Squeaky Fromme tried to shoot Gerald Ford but misfired, then John Hinckley Jr had a go at Ronald Reagan (but only punctured a lung).  I mean.  People shoot people (when they have guns).

I am distressed.  The word Dynasty sends me into tube stations or finds me buying sandbags on ebay.  This virus is dangerous, and it seems that millions may be infected without even recognising the symptoms.

Not that I ever watched soap.  My closest encounter with the genre was when, in 1969, I asked Warren Beatty how he was getting on in “Compact.”  Never been good with names.  I should have known it was Doug Beatty I wanted to meet.  Ever since then, perhaps in subliminal shame, I have eschewed all TV programmes that run in sequences.  There was something called “Beautiful” my wife used to watch when we lived in Italy, but I would leave the room at the opening chord of the theme.  Same with Corrie, East Enders, and so on…..

Then Larry Hagman suffered and degenerated into dust.  Ozymandias.  And yet I am brung down.  My feelings outweigh my understanding.  Black holes appear all over my body and I find myself in need of a House Doctor. 

So I am wasting away.  Made ill by the absence of a Dynasty I no more asked for than I elected to invade Britain with Willie the Conqu.  The subconscious is a wonderful thing.  As long as it doesn’t surface.  In my bed I play mental scrabble with myself to while away the hours and forget Dallas.  I have the letters SXAECBGURO in my hand and cannot think of a word or phrase (valid since 1917 – the Windsor Rules) that I can make with this.

Tish.  My nurse brings me a cold compress.  A tisane. Royal Jelly.  Anything to soothes my frets.

And then I hear that the Duchy of Cambridge is pregnant.  The third in line to the thrown is about to be bored.  A certain Dynasty is not to be Terminated. Yea!! I can rise from my frailty, cast off my mourning shrouds and breathe again the cool air of Windsor….. Hyperemesis gravidarum notwithstanding (and no memory of my stopping the family commute every day for weeks for my wife to gracefully vomit on the verge before work will affect this); I wish no one ill, but I want to dance down the street, shimmy on the trestle tables left out from the Jumbly party, and shout Halleluiah, Who Cares!  The Dynasty is on the road again!  Without any rancour we can all look forward to a secure future of Honours and privilege and everything that Grates about Britain….

Bring back Larry Hagman.  At least he was a star! 

The Larry Hagman Foundation: 

“Evil does Good” (That's what it says!)

http://www.larryhagman.com/