Royal treatment | 7 June 2018

In Competition No. 3051 you were invited to supply an entry by a well-known diarist describing the wedding day of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
 
There was a bracingly waspish streak running through your contributions. Here’s Noël Coward’s verdict on the groom: ‘Massively butch but far too hairy, when he wasn’t even in the Navy. Are beards de rigueur these days?…’ And Alan Clark on Meghan Markle (though he spares us a reference to her ‘juggling globes’): ‘Harry initially appeared to have done equally well with the succulent Miss Markle, but a glance at this morning’s Telegraph informed me not only that she is of below-stairs stock but a bloody yank…’ Honourable mentions go to Basil Ransome-Davies and Rob Stuart for those.
 
Sylvia O. Smith, meanwhile, imagines a somewhat bewildered Samuel Pepys: ‘In honour of the occasion, it would appear that even the lunatics have been granted temporary leave of absence from the asylum, for many of those present are wandering around clutching small metallic objects and speaking animatedly into the air, although they are quite alone…’
 
In a smallish and rather patchy entry, the five printed below stood out and are rewarded with £30 each.

Mam never cared for weddings (‘Too much flim-flam’) but she would make an exception for Royalty, flim-flam being deemed more appropriate at national level. Back then that meant saving the commemorative supplements from newspapers. Now it’s sitting in front of the TV with a mug of tea and a custard cream, trying to follow the commentary as it jumps from one minor Royal to the next. This time, with the American dimension and more than a whiff of show business, it’s less reverential and closer to the spoof royal sagas on other channels. Rupert slipped out during the Archbishop’s address to make scones, an assertion of British values.