I shouldn't enjoy The Crown...but I do

We’re watching The Crown at the moment. I’m miles behind, way back in series one, so don’t tell me what happens in the end.

Prince Charles seems like a happy fellow doesn’t he? Now, he hasn’t been sent off to boarding school yet but I shouldn’t imagine that will do him much harm.

Of course, as a red-blooded, proud Irishman, I should watch The Crown purely to express my disgust at such an abhorrent family which represented the yoke of 800 years of oppression; to scoff at the ludicrous idea that you can be head of state purely by accident of birth.

I should balk at the subservience, the blind adoration the people seem to give them.

And yet. It’s just that… OK sorry, but I want in. I want a butler to bring me tea in the morning. And people to drive me around and open the car door. A car door that opens the other way with the hinge on the back.

I want a life where I don’t have to keep receipts, get parking or petrol, take out the bins, ring Eircom, go for the NCT, remove all metal belongings out of my pockets and place on the tray provided, try and figure out the unexpected item from the bagging area, have to look for a scissors even though we bought TEN OF THEM a month ago.

I want a library, a pantry, a room only for wellingtons, a servant whose only job is to remember what I was saying when I was interrupted, I want drawers where the socks are only one deep.

I want to watch Dermot Bannon’s show and shout ‘peasants’! at people who are trying to open up the main living area. I’ll tell you what opens up a living area — being surrounded by thousands of acres of parkland.

I only want to see the children when they are all washed and fed and changed and are now wearing adorable little pinafores and have been taught to say “good morning Papaah” and bring me my breakfast cigar.

Children who know that if they misbehave, croquet later that morning will be simply out of the question as Papaah decides to punish them by going off drinking in a quaint tavern with his gillies and beaters because he is emotionally aloof. But the great thing about emotional aloofness is it takes so much less work.

I don’t smoke anymore but I still want a wooden box of cigarettes on my desk to offer to foreign dignitaries and light it with something that looks like it could be an Agatha Christie murder weapon.

I want to have relatives who don’t have surnames, just regions in Germany at the end of their name.

There’s a great quote in The Crown episode about the aftermath of King George V’s death. The abdicated king and brother of George, Bertie wants to address ‘his people’ even though he is no longer king, before sailing back to New York.

“Oh, no one wants to hear from a private individual”, snorts his mother Queen Mary. I’m shouting “YES QUEEN” at the screen. I’m sick of the views of private individuals.

I bet the Mountbatten-Windsor-Wie-Komme-Ich-Am-Besten-Zum-Bahnhofstrasses never had to listen to the ‘comment line’ on the radio to see what some private individual/gobshite with a phone thought about Brexit or dog-fouling or cyclists breaking lights.

Radio was reserved for some opera, declarations of war, or a hilarious comedy of manners about a doddery earl who mistook a bannister for his valet and had it thrashed for insolence.

There were no text polls or twitter machines. The private individual went about his day hewing coal or doffing his cap or fetching something from the scullery.

He wasn’t ringing in to a radio show that is desperate to fill time, to see what “our resident medical expert” thought about his funny looking mole.

Heavy lies the crown, but I’d like to try it on for size anyway.