Fortescue Towers

Random ramblings from the life and times of Col. Fortescue Featherstonehaugh Fortescue.

Monday, February 14, 2005

Royal Engagements

So, HRH is getting betrothed eh ? One supposes one will have to give the servants a day off and no doubt the ladies of the W.I will be busy knitting cakes and brewing jam or whatever it is they do and covering the village with red, white and blue bunting for the big day. Seems like five minutes since the last one, then again, given the size of the family it probably is.

Of course, one is staunchly for the monarchy. After all, ones family have been serving them on the fields of battle since Agincourt where Sir Clarence de Fortesque gave the frogs a jolly sound thrashing. However, one does not think one will be receiving an invitation to the royal knees up. Not since the incident involving ones grandfather, 'Binky' Fortescue and a certain man who would be king. Royalty it seems have long memories.

Personally one thinks he should have been awarded the VC for the scandal he managed to avert. How was he to know that Madame Fifi LaTouche was in fact Sir Cuthbert Topswell-Slimme. It was dashed lucky he managed to get Mr.X back to the palace without being spotted. All it would have taken was one lightning fast scribbler to be out and about and before you knew it the front pages of the next days penny dreadfuls would have been covered with artful engravings of a royal personage staggering bollock naked through Piccadilly save for a Masonic pinny, a handful of French Ticklers, a feather duster and singing 'Four and twenty virgins' in a deep baritone and a headline of 'Prurient Princes Private Peccadilloes'. Papparazzi have nothing on the sketch artists of the 1880s, could bang off a sketch in the time it takes for todays tabloids to come up with the headline 'Royal in Gender Bending MP Scandal'

Of course, HRH was not amused and ones grandfather was banished to the North-West frontier for rather a long time and one believes Sir Cuthbert was made Keeper of Her Imperial Majesties Sewerage System in the next honours list in order to keep him out of the way after Mr. X was heard to enquire about 'that delightful young filly' he had become acquainted with on one of his nocturnal excursions. In fact, one has heard rumours of sewerage engineers inspecting Mr Bazalgettes legacy to the nations sanitary habits being accosted by a ghostly, bedraggled transvestite enquiring which way it is to the palace.