Christ’s Entry Into Brussels by Dimitri Verhulst

Author:Dimitri Verhulst
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781846274688
Publisher: Portobello Books
Published: 2014-10-15T05:00:00+00:00

But even if you had ideological objections to monarchy as a form of government, considered the notion of the sceptre passing to someone who had simply inherited it medieval, and couldn’t stomach the idea of the Crown being protected at all times – even if you were horrified by the enormous subsidies poured each year into the tomatoes in the royal greenhouses just to maintain a symbol – you still had little difficulty in admitting that the monarch was probably a great bloke. I say ‘probably’ because, of course, you didn’t know him personally. Anyone who wanted to get to know the King had to move to a flood-prone area or survive a train crash. But then, assuming your first impressions were rendered more reliable by a life richly filled with human contacts, you would be very likely to admit that our monarch was pleasant company. Speaking for myself, I would not have had any objections to dining with him. He was, if I’ve judged his character correctly, essentially a dead ordinary softy, a person like you or me who secretly reached into the frying pan at home with his dirty fingers. A cheerful sneak, skilled in the unnoticed filching of chocolates, creative when it came to unearthing occasions on which to drink an extra glass of wine. A person with bowel movements so troublesome that he often didn’t leave the toilet until the newspaper ink had penetrated his knees. Unlike the ancient skalds, our poets should present our king as a gentleman with endearing failings, a supply of slightly risqué jokes he could draw on to accompany a digestif, a hearing aid, high cholesterol. Someone who had had his indiscretions and felt remorse for the heartache it had caused his wife, the Queen, a former model who was now showing a little too much craquelure. But the King was not the kind of person who would show us up in front of Christ – the commission members in the priory of Val-Duchesse reached agreement on that too, just before the crème brùlée was served.

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