It was well past time you took a bit of freedom
24.2.1. for you.
24.3. Because if you didn’t
24.3.1. no one else would do it for you.
He takes his crown off his head.
He worries it around with his fingers.
25. How much was this crown?
25.1. This proof and reproof of your status?
25.2. It is not a question you thought you might ask, when you were at school.
25.3. What happens when you need to buy a crown?
25.3.1 And you do not mean a tiara.
25.3.1.1. (You’re not on your hen night.
25.3.1.2. Much as you might wish you were…)
25.4. You mean a proper, fuck off I’m a king crown.
25.4.1. (John Lewis don’t stock them.
25.4.1.1. Not even Peter Jones.
25.4.1.2. The last piece of evidence the shops were founded by a Marxist.
25.4.1.3. ‘My apologies, sir, we’ve never had a royal headwear department.’)
26. Why go where every other monarch has gone before you?
27. Elizabeth Duke.
27.1. As your royal jewellers by warrant.
27.1.1. It wasn’t your first choice.
28. A crown helicoptered in specially.
28.1. Now the only thing you’ll be able to take with you.
28.2. The last relic of your reign.
28.3. The only relic of your reign.
28.4. Not many monarchies will leave a lighter footprint than yours.
29. You would love to stuff your pockets with jewels and dubloons, wine and old masters and furs and silks; whatever you are meant to do – to claim as yours – when the curtain is coming down. A hogshead or two. But no.
30. All you have left is a cheap shit, £9.99 crown from Argos.
30.1. And a little blue pen.
30.1.1. ‘Order No. SJ33, please come to the collection point.’
And a hedera falls off the page.
31. You consider whether the audience might be forgiven for being confused.
31.1. ‘He’s brown. Brown people can’t be king.’
31.1.2. ‘Can they?’
31.2. ‘Maybe where they come from, they can be kings there? They come from places that still have kings, don’t they?’
31.2.1. ‘All the glitzy turbans in the Raj, they were princes or mararajahs anyway.’
31.2.2. ‘Oh, but wasn’t Victoria the Empress, so she outranked them all.’
31.2.3. ‘But didn’t we give them our democracy and shit, so there wouldn’t be any more kings?’
31.2.4. ‘So what’s he doing here with a crown on his head, pretending to be one?’
32. Good question.
33. You are not sure how you got here either.
33.1. But before you tell that story, you should say where ‘here’ is.
33.1.1. For all you live-action battlefield tourists.
34. What you see, that’s just the appearance. What something looks like. Not the truth.
34.1. Your eyes don’t tell you what’s true.
34.2. Remember – it’s the lie of the land.
34.2.1. You find the real story under the contours of the map.
35. A map unrolled from the heavens, swamping you in topography.
36. So, before the fighting started –
36.1. entirely predictably, by the way –
36.1.1. two over-proud and under-clever populations rubbing each other up the wrong way for three-quarters of a millennium.
36.2. This little ol’ hamlet where I’m now reigning had been a governmental nightmare.
36.2.1. A continental oddity.
36.2.1.1. An administrative anomaly.
36.2.1.2. A legalistic fuck-up.
37. It’s hard to see why. It’s hard to see much here.
37.1. Some squares that mean something to someone.
37.1.1. A few coloured lines making a collection of villages.
37.2. Or maybe a power play.
37.3. An aborted archipelago, that forgot where the sea was.
37.4. The dangers of irrational geography.
38. What do you see here?
38.1. The future history of humanity.
38.2. One endless, individual bun fight.
39. It was – was – a town where two countries intertwined.
39.1. Not met, but mixed.
39.2. One house was in one country.
39.2.1. The neighbours in another.
39.3. No joke.
39.4. One door, Crazyland.
39.4.1. Next door Barmylandia.
39.4.1.1. Not that I can call them that any more.
39.4.1.2. Because somebody will shoot me
39.4.1.3. for being an insult of a neighbour.
39.4.2. And yes, in some of the houses a border right through the bathroom too.
40. Three thousand people, living as two.
41. Or they were.
41.1. With double of everything.
41.2. Many
