Common wealth

June 23, 2003 at 4:24 pm | In yulelogStories | Comments Off

Is anyone else thinking about how the royals really are different from you and me? We’ve heard about self-styled comedy terrorist Aaron Barschak, who breached security at Windsor Castle to gate-crash Prince William’s 21st birthday party last Saturday. But did everyone read to the final paragraphs and learn that the royals were having an “Africa-themed fancy dress party”? My son sarcastically wondered what the Queen came dressed as. Shaka Zulu perhaps? Ah, royals amongst themselves, play-acting memories of Empire and Commonwealth. Until “Osama bin Laden” gate-crashed even their party. What’s that aphorism about history repeating itself as comedy the second time around?

Count down

June 23, 2003 at 4:21 pm | In yulelogStories | Comments Off

The BBC reports on a recent study predicting that men might soon outlive women. For illustration, BBC used a photo of Joanna Lumley as the AbFab character Patsy Stone. Patsy chainsmokes and drinks “Stoly” straight from the bottle; in this photo she is atop a Manhattan skyscraper, about to be rescued via helicopter by her friend Edina Monsoon. (Smoking and drinking look very glamourous here; why did BBC have to use this picture?) Stress at work, however, is the third factor in the triumvirate riding roughshod on female life expectancy. And could I just add that not having a wife will no doubt accelerate women’s earlier demise even more? Women are supposed to live longer, as Ashley Montagu in The Natural Superiority of Women already pointed out decades ago. They are biologically suited for it. But if they smoke, drink, and get stressed out like men, they’ll die like men, to paraphrase Martin Jarvis of Cancer Research UK, a critic of the new life-expectancy data.

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