A Right Royal Embarassment.

It's been a while since my last post, I've been busy with real life these last couple of weeks. I know it's hard to believe comic nerds have lives, but there you go. I'll probably blog about it in the near future, including my drunken hiking trip in the wilds of Worcestershire, but I'll wait until a bit more dust has settled on what my youngest brother now refers to as 'The Bewdley Incident' before I tell you all the gory details.
This post is about the Olympic Games that are happening at the moment. Whilst I'm pleased that Team GB has won so many medals this time, there's one thing that pisses me off about it all, and that's when our national anthem gets played when they're on the podium. What a horrible, dreary, out-of-date tune.
From a purely musical point of view, it's dull. In my opinion, a national anthem should be rousing. Not the same note over and over again. It's the lyrics and sentiment of it that bugs me. There are sixty million people living in Britain, why should we focus all our thanks on the one person, who, by accident of birth, happens to be our head of state? Especially at sporting events. I mean, for example, was it the Queen who got up at five every morning to go to the local swimming pool and train for years? Nope.
It's the same whenever the English football team play. I get embarrassed when the anthem is played. Only half of the team sing along. I've noticed that it tends to be the southern lads who sing along, and the northern lads who just stand there stony-faced (unless it's a northern lad that's the captain, he kind of has to or the newspapers will moan at him).
No other European monarchy's national anthem is so arse-kissy. You don't hear the Spanish football fans singing about their king (but that's probably because they're too busy making monkey noises at the opposing team's black players).
And what do the Scottish and Welsh athletes who win gold think when the national anthem is played? I can't see them giving much of a shit about our Queen. Since devolution, the Scots and Welsh have their own anthems now, so in that respect, God Save The Queen is outdated. It's a throwback to the days of the empire, and seeing as the empire no longer exists makes the song obsolete.

Maybe it's because I'm from an Irish family that I have a bit of disrespect for the royal family (my grandad used to spend his mornings writing funny comments all over the royals' pictures in the paper, and he never calls Prince Charles by his name, always referring to him as 'Lappy Lugs') but I do think of myself as English, and I'm proud of my Englishness. I just think that in the 21st Century, the thought of bowing and scraping to someone just because they happen to be from a cetain family is ridiculous. At the very least, we should change our bleeding horrible national anthem to something that's a bit more celebratory and inclusive.