101 YEARS OLD AND STILL GUARDING OUR HERITAGE...
THE Apostropher Royal, Sir D’Anville O’M’Darlin’, sounded in great distress when he rang me yesterday. “Beachcomber!” he shrieked. “Have you heard the rumours? They’re planning to do away with me.”
“Nonsense,” I replied in a firm but calming voice. “They wouldn’t dare. Whatever gives you that idea?”
“Haven’t you seen the Very Dark Green Paper from some apparatchik at the Department for Saving Money?” he asked. “There’s a whole list of royal appointees they want to get rid of and they say that even Black Rod and I may not be safe. It’s the worst crisis in the country’s history since they abolished the post of Groom of the Stool in 1901.”
“Well that wasn’t so bad surely,” I commented. “There hasn’t been much call since then for anyone to carry the royal chamber pot on long coach journeys.”
“That’s not the point,” he insisted. “It’s the principle that’s at stake.”
“I’ll investigate and call you back,” I promised, and after a few phone calls, I had found all I needed to know.
Everybody knows about the Master of the Queen’s Music, and the Astronomer Royal, and the Apostropher Royal, and Black Rod, who bangs on the door of Parliament with his eponymous rod to open the place.
But there are many royal appointees with whom we are less familiar and now some upstart at the DMS (Department for Money Saving) has circulated a top secret discussion document with a proposed hit list of roles he thinks can be dispensed with, including all those whose specific skills have not been called upon since 1900.
The list is headed by Gold Stick in Waiting, who walks behind Black Rod at each opening of Parliament and is ready with his old stick in case Black Rod forgets to bring his rod.
Then come Royal Blue Permanent and Royal Blue Washable, who are in charge respectively of the Monarch’s Stationery Cupboard and the Royal Bathroom; the Master of the Queen’s Muzak, a role created in case it was ever decided to install lifts at Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace and play tinkly tunes in them and in other public spaces of the buildings; the Doggerel Laureate, who writes trite lines of verse in royal greetings cards, (his services were last called upon for a Christmas Card sent by Queen Victoria, which bore the words: “Christmas greetings, how’ve you been? All the best, HM the Queen.”)
Most serious of all however is the suggestion that the roles of Royal Blue Permanent and the Apostropher Royal can be combined after Brexit because our leaving the EU will mean that we no longer be obliged to store umlauts, grave and acute accents, upside down Spanish question marks and small circles to put on top of the letter “a” in Swedish.
This, according to the unnamed writer of the Very Dark Green Paper, will free enough space in the Royal Stationery Cupboard to store the royal apostrophes in preparation for the monthly delivery to greengrocers.
I rang Sir D’Anville to assure him that his post was probably safe.