Lovely men in uniform, dancing

We are up and in front of the telly for the 9am start. Mother does not want to miss any of the coverage: she loves ceremony and we are all excited about... not being at work. We even have Christmas Day breakfast: bucks fizz, scrambled egg with smoked salmon, croissants, by 10.30 I'm pretty pissed. I've not had that much to drink, but, well, it is 10.30am. By this stage Bartelt is up too. He is also celebrating having finished his antibiotics. He has been on them, on-and-off, all year... that's nearly four months. He thinks the whole thing started with some kind of insect bite back in Hawaii in December. It would seem that his leg – maybe the bone – has been infected. His leg gets red, swollen, painful. He's been on various antibiotics and we are hoping that this time they have worked. Because of his cow heart valve he has to be really careful with infections; because of all the immuno-suppressants he is on for his arthritis he has to be really careful with infections; because, unbeknown to anyone, has has a Syndrome, he has to be careful with infections. I appreciate my health so much more since I've spent time with this bellicose-crystal-vase of a man. The four of us are installed in front of the TV, around the breakfastpicnic. Actually, I am only here under sufferance. When I suggested we spend the day with mum and her sister Zee, mother had serious doubts: she has many memories of my laughing long and hard at royal ceremonies she very much enjoys and sees the point of. This spoils them for her, she says, telling me to shut up as she laughs at my stinging and pithy insights. There are crowds of people and lines of police – this wedding happens a few months before the riots of August 2011 which will hit London and spread across the country, the military in the dress uniforms, horses, flags: all that stuff. My father was one of the last people to do national service. There were lots of things he loved about it: skiing being one highlight, but Mum says he really loved the marching because it was almost like dancing, and he loved to dance. Mum is always reminded of Dad by this kind of ceremonial spectacular. She may be 71 – just – and so it's a pensioner reminiscing about her now-dead husband. But for me, for Zee, for anyone who knew him, he was 41 and she 38 when he died: young people. She was younger than I am now. I feel... helpless, as I always have, when she talks about him. Yes, it's fun to reminisce, but he is not here and he would have loved it. I was too small to have been of any help to my mother, to anyone – least of all, I'm sure various therapists would agree – to my self. Losing a primary carer between the ages of five and seven is a bad thing, according to the specialists in child development: you are old enough to understand that someone is dead (as much as any of us can 'understand' death, and that ain't much) but your ego is not well enough developed for you to deal with it (whatever 'deal with it' might mean). I know that. I know the theory, but it is painful, still so painful, more than 30 years on not to be able to magic my father out of thin air for Mum, not for my own sake, but for my hers. I'm not a selfless person, but on this one matter I feel, if I could only get him back for one of us, it would be for my mother. But we are very lucky, because we have Zee and Bartelt here. I am plugged into Twitter, watching my Republican mates and followees snipe and laugh at the whole thing, but I am in a room with Mum, who's loving it, Zee, who is a wedding-dress maker for a living, and so is looking forward to seeing the dress, and Bartelt, from Germany, that famous federal republic... but who seems to be turning into a royalist before our very eyes... He asks lots of questions and we all answer about history, about the way our government works, what the uniforms mean, who the celebrity and less-well-known royals are, the marriages, divorces, the famous people coming in and out, our constitution, Oliver Cromwell, Charleses I and II and all that. And, at some point before lunchtime, when we're into the second bottle of fizzy, he declares himself a royalist and he and mother exchange excited and secret glances. I think it's because he likes the men in uniforms, but he insists it's because he likes the choreography, precision and the way the car stops at exactly the right time and the right spot to the inch outside the cathedral. Well, I suppose he is German, like our royal family, I point out.