Why I’m Ashamed of the Royal Wedding
As a British expat who moved to Vancouver six months ago, there are a few questions I’ve gotten used to.
Where are you from?
How close is that to London?
Are you excited about the Royal Wedding?
Respectively: Yorkshire; geographically and culturally, very far; and no: it makes me feel sick.
I’m not bitter about love, or marriage, or its public celebration. I don’t care that celebrity culture means millions of unconnected people will be watching an intimately emotional moment.
What makes me ashamed is the estimated £30m of public money going toward security — when, three miles away, 11 months ago, 72 people died in a fire because of tight public purse strings.
It feels like an act of collective dissociation, to hold both a lavish royal wedding and the facts of Grenfell Tower against one another in our heads and admit they are contemporary parts of our national history. To know that less than a year ago people died in one of the most dehumanising ways possible, because…
