No beer at royal wedding

According to the Daily Mail and others, the consumption of beer has been banned from the Wedding of the Year.

Apparently William and Kate wish to have a "sophisticated" experience. Quite right too. After all, a couple of glasses of Blue Nun or Lambrusco and I'm as ready to read Proust and swap Wildean  bons mots* as the next Archdruid. Whereas beer - well, that would be the drink of working class people, who need to drink greater volumes of their chosen bevvy to replace all the sweat they've lost while working down coal mines. And therefore appreciate the lower alcoholic content, as it enables them to drink eight or nine pints before they get the urge to have a union jack tattooed on their stomachs and then go off to trash a restaurant or two in Thame or another suitable location. Lucky they've not invited anyone like that to the wedding.

There was a church hall not far from here, that used to have a list of rules on the wall. And one was that, while beer was banned, it was acceptable to drink wine at social functions. And the message was that while good well-behaved Christian folk could drink wine, given a crack at the juice of the malt they would run amok. Or, to look at it another way, Christianity is middle-class. You want to be a good Christian, you gotta act like the Normans and Romans. Or, to look at it another, another way, "we don't want your sort in here".

I hope the reports are wrong. Instead of drinking fizzy French wine, I hope the Royal Family will be enjoying the delights of Titanic's Royal Ale, Adnams' Royal Wedding Ale or the many others that are currently being brewed in the belief that the natural drink of choice for the English people, when celebrating a British event, is English beer.

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For a list of suitable Royal bons mots, you may like to read this from the Guardian. Sophisticated chaps, those wine drinkers.