William the tired

He’d taken the keys to the new palace that morning. A modern palace in Hyde Park, for a modern king, centuries of tradition cast aside, an end to stuffiness and pomp!

Designed by Richard Rogers, it’s airy glass mezzanines and sharp modernist angles, which Papa would have so hated, showed that he was finally in charge.

Young enough to make a difference. Too impatient to wait. And it was all tax-free. Things couldn’t have worked out better.

Grandmama had been easy, it had merely been a question of placing her sceptre and mace, above her partially opened bedroom door. Then, when she came in at night – bingo! A wheeze he had played a million times at Eton with buckets of water. It was ironic! Decapitated by her own outdated symbols of power.

Papa was always going to prove more difficult. He’d toyed with giving him a man-eating venus fly trap, or pretending that pater had laughed himself to death listening to the Goon Show. But then the media suspected foul play in the case of Grandmama and a solution presented itself.

Who had the most to gain from her death? Why papa of course, his finger prints were all over the mace and sceptre because he sneaked into the throne-room to practice kinging when no one was looking.

Eventually an angry mob had burst into Highgrove House and trampled papa to death while he was tending his prize begonia.

In a sentimental move the New King moved some of pater’s prized flowers into his own garden, it was what they old boy would have wanted and he was all heart you see.

But as he lay in his bed and the royal clocks struck midnight, a green and ghastly ghostly flower hovered in the ether above his head, it had two giant leaves that resembled the huge ears of….., but no it couldn’t be…...

“This new Palace” said the apparition “is an act of vandalism! Like a monstrous carbuncle on a much loved and elegant friend! Like an assembly hall for the academy of secret police!!”

It couldn’t be but it was…….

The plant continued this way for several hours and was still blathering on when the new king shot a glance at the grandfather clock to find it’s hands hadn’t moved an inch. Time stood still as it always seem to when Pater discussed any of his pet subjects.

Every night for the next month the spirit returned to deliver it’s ghoulish lecture. The new king developed bags under his eyes and quite lost his reforming zeal.

His abandonment of the new palace, abdication and the birth of the glorious new republic has been widely attributed to societal changes and it’s true that Britain’s overlong adherence to a monarchical system now seems antiquated, but there are also some who say that Prince Charles’s prize begonia, that one with ear-like leaves that still flourishes in Hyde Park where the new palace used to stand, also had a role in the fall of the House of Windsor.

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