Surrealist cognitive dissonance

The threats of the unions to organise strike action to coincide with the Royal Wedding came to naught in the end. One suspects that some shady part of the establishment brought pressure to bear on the union leaders, or perhaps they realised that their proletariat workers are actually rather fond of the monarchy. The day was free from terrorist atrocities too, all credit to our spooks and law enforcement agencies.

The wedding was streamed live on the YouTube Royal Channel, gloriously free of inane commentary, but the frame rate gradually decreased, until it ground to an ignominious halt just as the bride arrived at the Abbey. The BBC News website was similarly afflicted. I flipped across to the CNN website whose video stream wasn't affected by network congestion.

After a pretty standard Church of England wedding ceremony, the newly-wed couple left the Abbey with the orchestra playing Sir William Walton's "Crown Imperial" march written in 1937 for the coronation of George VI.  There are echos of this march in the familiar orchestral themes of Star Wars, Superman and Indiana Jones. Watching Kate and William process down the aisle, I was struck with a surrealist cognitive dissonance as my mind kept overlaying imagery from the Star Wars medal ceremony over the top of the footage of Westminster Abbey.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A confusing smorgasbord of antipathies

I was born in the 70s. That gender could have a separate definition to biological sex wasn't a question that had hit the general public consciousness,  so I grew up in a gender normative environment at a time when biological sex and gender were considered to be the same and immutable. Sixty years after the suffragettes started the feminist movement, my mother's generation pushed the cause forward.  My mother taught me to ignore society's sexist prejudices. I learnt from her to not limit my ambitions or accept being treated as lesser. Fast forward another two generations and sexism is still ubiquitous, if less blatant, and it still blighting women's lives around the world. The place we find ourselves in now, where we are challenging the notion that biological sex and gender are the same or that is gender is immutable, has been a long time in arriving. If it mirrors the slow progress made by the feminist movement, there could be many decades of struggle ahead, and stil
Read more

Why, oh why, am I puffed up like a balloon after my operation?

I'm swollen around the chest area as I'd expect after the double mastectomy - there are some sloshy seromas building up which I've been told not to worry about - the seromas should self-resolve, and if not they can be drained with a needle. I was particularly aware, as I woke up this morning, that my face and neck feel quite puffy. My eyes feel all crowded in by swollen eye lids. I feel like I've gained 10 pounds around my middle too. This swelling has been developing since my operation three days ago. I thought it was my imagination until I looked in the mirror and saw a big round moon face looking back at me. Why, oh why, am I puffed up like a balloon after my operation? Thank goodness for the internet. While it can on occasion lead us down dark alleyways, often it can take us straight into the light... It seems evolution provided a way for injured animals to lay up for a few days to recover from traumatic injuries. With an injury hormones are released which
Read more

Brimming with possibility

The day after my last post I fell ill with flu, which delayed my operation by two weeks. I'm now two days post-surgery, back home, and recovering. I had breast cancer operations in 2001 and again in 2008. Those were traumatic experiences, my post surgery recovery was tainted with feelings of loss, and fear for the future. Each of those operations were just the heralds of more debilitating treatment - the long hard slog of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Following on from that were the yearly scans and tests to check for new cancers and secondaries, a regular cycle of building tension as each appointment came due, plunged back into the medical world for the tests, then the gruelling wait for results, hoping to hear those precious words "all the tests came back clear" and feel the giddy relief once more. This has framed the last 18 years of my life. I allowed it to box me in. I focused on getting through each day. I made no long term plans. I did not peer in
Read more