Peter Rhodes on deer, cartoons and His Majesty's struggle with a favourite dance
Thanks to the excellent documentary Charles R: The Making of a Monarch (BBC1), we now know that we have a king who can sail, ski, fly, dive, speak Welsh and command a warship but who hasn't quite mastered the hokey-kokey.
Mind you, he could have plenty of time to learn it. The order of service for his Coronation includes the invitation for the people to declare: “May the King live for ever.” This invocation, dating from Handel's anthem Zadok the Priest in 1727 at the Coronation of George II, is mad, bad and simply weird.
If fulfilled by the Almighty, “May the King live for ever” would not only defy nature but put the lid on Prince William's hopes of ever succeeding his father. We want a long-lived king, not an immortal one.
There are an estimated two million deer in Britain, more than at any time since the Norman conquest of almost 1,000 years ago. Last week their numbers were almost diminished by one when a big, bold roe deer stepped out of the wood, almost into the path of my car. No harm done, it trotted majestically in front of us for a few yards, then hopped back into the trees.
For decades in our slice of the Green Belt, we hardly ever saw a deer; now they are commonplace. They do enormous damage to woodland where they devour the shoots of saplings, hence the growing campaign to cull their numbers by issuing more hunting licences and encouraging Brits to eat more venison. I foresee a snag. It takes a lot of skill and a high-velocity rifle to kill a deer. On this crowded little island, bullets with a lethal range of more than a mile are, to put it mildly, a problem. Culling deer may be in the national interest. Culling ramblers is not.
These are grim times at the Guardian. First its founders are proved to have links with the 19th century slave trade. Next, it hurriedly removes a hideous cartoon for alleged anti-semitism. If this is the voice of compassionate liberalism these days, what are the fascists reading?
No, Your Majesty. You put your left leg in . . .
