steepholm

Classic FM today. Radio 4 is a Republican Free Zone.

This morning the World Service was reporting on the clothes worn by reporters from other countries as they waited for/commented on events. I retreated to Radio 3 which (mostly) confined baby-drivel to the news slots.

I have been spoiled by Twitter and the flexibility of muting keywords, hashtags and the like - I need this facility to be available for my radio.

This!

Yes.

I am the sole Republican in this office - a lone voice in the Royalist wilderness crying "B*ll*cks!"

Well said!

The Guardian site has allowed users to filter out all Royal hellspawn-related results, I think? If we had a pledge of allegiance I'd pledge it to the bleedin' Guardian.

Vive la sodding guillotine.

I was alerted to this by cmcmck. It's been a godsend!

There have been a few moments of protest, even on Radio 4, but I'm finding my own thoughts are the best companion for most of today.

Imitate us. Australia keeps them at a safe distance. We let them visit from time to time and the Queen gets to sign our decrees into law and to sack a Prime Minister once every hundred years or so. If the royal family did any more than this, then we would become a republic, so they're quite careful.

We get media frenzies still, but the royal family still comprises lesser beings when compared to Sporting Heroes, so even that kinda works.

The Irish are only part of the story. I think our pride in our criminal ancestry is the main part.

That's us :). Terribly consistent.

How much fuss is there when an incumbent prime minister's wife has a baby, something which I believe has happened fairly frequently in the last few administrations? Not too much, I hope. Since people WILL carry on over something, a royal family at least provides neutral figures to take the gushing off the politicians.

Not that it isn't annoying. It hasn't been anywhere near this intense, depending on exactly what media you're looking at, but over a dozen years of gushing over Peter Jackson and his hackwork has made me pretty cross.

The Camerons, and even the Blairs, irrc, were quite low key about their children's births, I think.

If people want to gush, let them gush to like-minded friends - but I don't see why the BBC has to join in, as if everyone in the country were of one mind.

But I don't think there's anything neutral about the royal family. It's true they're not party political (though I'd be amazed if the queen weren't a Tory), but they're the lynchpin of a whole political system. If it weren't for the monarchy, the absurdity of the constitutional arrangements for the upper chamber would be far more apparent, for a start; and the incredible proportion of the country that's in private (mostly aristocratic) hands might actually appear on the radar. Here, the so-called cousinhood, comprising 0.3% of the population, owns around 66% of the land; and while I know there are similar disproportions in the US, at least people there are aware of the fact and talking about it, rather than accepting it as some kind of natural/divine dispensation. Then there's the general culture of deference, which wastes talent on such a colossal scale and has turned the cabinet is a kind of finishing school for Eton, Harrow and Westminster.

Not that getting rid of the monarchy would change all this at a stroke, but its disposal would make reform of the rest far more possible. (It would also bestow on this poor child the slim possibility of not having its life totally screwed up.)

You and Yours at lunchtime was devoted to the problems of teenagers. There was no mention of royal babies during the time I was eating lunch.

The royal birth isn't bothering me much, to be honest, but we only have the radio on at certain times of day and scarcely watch TV live, preferring to video series and then watch as and when convenient.

I think what pushed me over the edge was turning on the radio at 5.45am (after a thundery night with a sleepless cat), only to hear the presenter of Prayer for the Day - a programme that has no business existing on the BBC - start by referring to John Donne's "classic poem, 'No man is an island'" (several WTF points right there - don't they have researchers any more?), and going on for a two-minute brown-nosed burble that picked up directly from where R4 had left off the night before before imploring God for more of the same... Yeck.

The Onion has the last word: http://www.theonion.com/articles/royal-baby-born,33171/

"Just like a fairy tale" is not very reassuring to anyone who actually remembers what fairy tales are like.