Our dear nations week got off to the most grotesque of starts (grotesque for those of us who are idealistically left-leaning and who have a social justice gene) with Monday mornings news of the celebrity Liberals given major Queens Birthday gongs.
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I have a bedside clock radio that pipes up at 5.59am to give me the morning chorus of ABC radios 6am news.
And so it came to pass that my Monday began with the newsreader, in one breath, trilling the names Tony Abbott, Bronwyn Bishop and Philip Ruddock. With each name I gave an involuntary shudder (my beneath-the-bedclothes shudder exciting the playful cat who sleeps on our bed, imagining my shudders to be movements of a hiding mouse) for they are all people I have heartily disliked for yonks.
Each has always had a cold, Liberal pebble where good people have a warm, humanitarian heart and their undeserved engongments turn out to have agitated many. As I write, letters to editors bristle with indignation.
Even when politicians are not as intrinsically awful as those three are, the notion that politicians should be gong-rewarded for their service raises the hackles of a free and independent-minded people. They, the free and independent-minded people, chorus, bless them, But isnt a politicians choice of profession already wholly self-serving? Isnt politics irresistible to limelight-seeking ambitious narcissists, while the rest of us quietly get on with fulfillingly useful professions, like plumbing, sex work, nursing and journalism? Just asking.
But two things, one of them my rich fantasy life, the other a miracle, enabled me to bounce back up from the gutter of melancholy into which news of the gong atrocity had kicked me.
To the miracle first and to how, for the umpteenth time during this pestilence, the guardian angel of poetry has intervened to save us from melancholys malignant clutches.
Each has always had a cold, Liberal pebble where good people have a warm, humanitarian heart.
The scene is Her Majesty the Queens chandelier-festooned study in Buckingham Palace. Portraits by Rubens look on from the walls. Her Majesty is seated at her desk (one of her corgis, unchecked, is chewing at one of the priceless antiques 16th century legs).
It is December 2019 and Her Majesty, 92 and irascible (hear her growling One is mad as hell! One is not going to take this any more!) is checking through the provisional list of Australian June 2020 Queens Birthday honours recipients sent to her by her loyal Liberal prime minister in Australia.
She ticks most of the names with her gold-nibbed pen, but baulks at three of them.
No, she pipes to her private secretary, in her familiarly cultured, but highly-pitched and chandelier-rattling voice.
One will not give ones regal approval for gongs in ones name to go to these people. There are some things a monarch will not do!
Here she launches into a breathtakingly well-informed and scathing critique of the careers of Tony Abbott, Bronywn Bishop and Phillip Ruddock.
She is especially dismissive of Tony Abbott.
Extreme monarchists always give one the creeps. And he even tried to give my dear husband a knighthood!
I remember it well maam, her private secretary replies, wincing at the memory.
And Her Majesty turns out to share the widespread Australian view that Bronwyn Bishop crowned an unpleasant parliamentary career by being an appalling Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Can you believe, Her Majesty seethes chandelier-rattlingly, while Speaker she suspended 400 MPs and that 393 of them (or 98.25 per cent) were Labor and only seven were of her own side?
At her command her private secretary, agog at his employers encyclopaedic knowledge of colonial politics, hands her the royal red-ink fountain pen. He watches her score a thick, cancelling line through the lists three offending names, rendering them deservedly gongless.
The hitherto expressionless faces in the Rubens portraits show expressions that say of the nonagenarian monarch
Gosh, shes awesome when shes decent with rage.
