The NHS isn't good enough for the Wingnut.

[Heid the Ba]

Or his daughter-in-law. I'm no doctor but it seems like plenty of people would like to skip the queue for a collapsed flange or inflamed prostate due to overenthusiastic pegging.

[Heid the Ba]

So not a flange like a broken cat flap but cancer, that sucks, but for millennials with a PR machine they couldn't something a something.

[Lianachan]

I lost the best friend I will ever know to cancer, recently. I have other friends, less close but good friends, busy dying of cancer as we speak. It's awful. But yes, pegging, something
, something as presented is hypocrisy, here we go again, etc.

[Arneb]

Not usually my subject, but I lazily clicked on an article on my favourite newsmagine's website. So the Crown Prince attended a D-Day commemoration event with the King and Queen, called it very moving et. etc. - what Crown Princes are supposed to say, and, asked by a journalist if his wife was getting better, he replied "yes".

And that is what got him into the news. What's wrong with everyone? Can't they leave a family with three cancer sufferers at the same time alone, apart from what they say in their professional capacity? I don't get how so many somehow have the feeling they own these people.

[Richard A]

I agree. Too many forget that they are human beings - possibly because the previous generation believed it was their duty not to show that. But at the same time, it's the deal. We pay for them the kind of figures that make the likes of Heid and Lianachan grind their teeth and believe that being able to pry into every detail of their lives is part of what we pay for. As Queen Caroline in The Madness of King George put it, "Smile and wave - it's what you're paid for. Smile and wave."

But the Crown Prince - even more than the King - is also a symbol of a new era. At the 75th anniversary, who would have predicted at the 80th, the Chancellor of Germany would be invited but not the President of Russia. But that is where we are. Today's alliance, shaky though it might be, runs to Berlin, not Murmansk. Hopefully the wheel will turn again and a new Head of State of a new Russia will be invited to a future event - whether or not anyone who was there on D-Day is still around to turn up. Just as I hope that I, not just our daughter, will get to see the UK's links with the EU re-established. Screw it - for all my pessimism, it only took 15 years last time. And things like that is what both the King and the Crown Prince symbolise - and the good thing is, they both know it.

[Lianachan]

I lost the best friend I will ever know to cancer, recently. I have other friends, less close but good friends, busy dying of cancer as we speak. It's awful. But yes, pegging, something
, something as presented is hypocrisy, here we go again, etc.

The second friend referred to above died on Sunday. Funeral next Friday.

I'm actually reasonably ambivalent about the royals. I resent every penny we give them, but if they were self-sufficient then I couldn't care less whether they all live forever or all get pushed into The Giant Mincing Machine.

[Heid the Ba]

Fuck, that sucks.

[Lance]

I'm sorry Lianachan.

[Arneb]

My condolences, old friend.