royal wedding day last year

About this time last year it was the Royal Wedding of Kate Middleton and Prince William. I remember everyone was quite excited, so they decided to make it into an event. The day before they gave us lots of red white and blue fabric so we could make strings of flags by tracing around and cutting out triangles to hang around the garden. At this time I had a permanent rock about 60% of my body weight residing in my chest and stomach which made it very difficult to do or say anything except sit on the sofa. But after a while they got me to make some flags.

All the nurses and patients gathered round on the sofas and arm chairs about two hours before the wedding even started. They were just showing pictures and commentaries on all the guests, so gradually most of the patients drifted off because they found it boring. Arianna stayed I think, she loved the royals, and Lucie because she couldn’t be any more than a couple of metres away from a nurse and they all wanted to watch it. I felt indifferent to the ceremony itself, but it was an event and might make time pass more quickly and it meant I could stay in my armchair for a few hours without anyone telling me to get up.

I liked listening to the nurses gossip and comment on all the guest’s clothes. It meant quite a lot to them I think. They were getting quite emotional about it. It made me think of them going home to their husbands or their flatmates and talking about Beatrice’s headgear and going out to the pub and then making a cup of tea and feeling very tired and going to their own bed to go to sleep. I think this was the day I disliked them the least. And then this made me think of all the people that would be doing that and all the streets with cars on and the magazines with the stories and the little sociological lego bricks painted bright colours just to cheer you up, without one of which everything would fall down and some kid would cry. And I thought of all the kids like me in hospitals who’d watch it on T.V and all the romantic people who’d cry and all the cynics who’d laugh. And then Kate and William were actually married, and I got tears in my eyes. Not because I was being romantic, but because it was a lego brick.

At home in Malvern Lucy had some people round to watch the wedding and the day went down in history because they stole all her mums’ alcohol and were all so drunk before 3 in the afternoon that they trashed her house and everyone was expecting Lucy to be in massive trouble but she wasn’t in that much trouble.