GOOD afternoon, and welcome to the Palace Virtualis Kate Middleton Tour. If you’re here for the Queen Elizabeth: She Will Rock You -- Last Great Queen Tour, or the comedic Charles in Charge Tour, please line up by the one-dimensional umbrella stand.
This tour is devoted to the royal existence of Catherine “Kate” Middleton. If you have an aversion to Coldplay, click on “2nd Thots” and exit this website. The band’s music is the backdrop to the images throughout, and yes, to you it will sound like the usual whiny, interminable mumbo-jumbo. Adieu.
For the rest of you, my name is Florentia Doolittle, and I’ll be your virtual tour guide. I am currently dressed like one of Kate Middleton’s ladies in waiting, but if you like, you can click the “Kate’s Famous 500 Outfits” icon at right and re-clothe my image. The royal blue engagement announcement dress is the second most popular choice; the Union Jack string bikini worn throughout the Las Vegas honeymoon is number one.
Our tour essentially begins in 2015, with the demise of Queen Elizabeth shortly after the expiration of Prince Philip. As you’re likely aware, the consort’s death quickly precipitated a unanimous vote in Parliament for Her Majesty to star on the UK’s popular TV reality series British Bachelorette, with advertising proceeds supporting the country’s crumbling civil service. Made distraught by this display of “mass vulgarity,” Queen Elizabeth II rebelled against Parliament’s edict by eating a suicidal shard of fresh garlic.
She was, of course, eulogized to the skies. Andrew Lloyd Webber composed an anthem in her honour. It was performed at maximum volume by a band of kilted bagpipers, and warbled in Westminster Abbey by Helen Mirren, to mixed reviews.
During the full year of mourning that followed Her Majesty’s untimely passing, her 67-year-old son ascended to the throne. King Charles, already a figure of fun for his eccentric marriages and obscure hobbies, immediately decreed that his people must all now hunt for their food. He quickly donated the U.K.’s meat-producing livestock to the colonies. “Loony King Charlie” then ordered the tearing down of any building constructed after 1858 in England, Scotland, and Wales.
Homeless, beef-starved rioters wrought havoc in the streets until Parliament used extraordinary powers to arrest and imprison Charles and his wife Camilla on a charge of “consorting too enthusiastically with horses.” Both were clapped into the Tower of London, where they eventually invented what they called a virtual “bored game,” Pretend Polo. It never caught on. Neither did Imaginary Ascot, sadly.
It’s at this point – about 2016 -- that we join the story of Kate and Wills, as they liked to be known. Despite the uproar, the young couple had been enjoying relative privacy at its “ultra-green” Harewood Park Estate in Herefordshire. Kate was a lithe and limber yoga nut who every night read English “misery memoirs” to Wills until they both fell asleep. They’d been quietly baking their own bread for several years. Their slow, ecstatic lovemaking was reportedly punctuated by the contented coos of the doves living in their eaves (not a euphemism, then or now), and politely stomached by their stoic Scottish bodyguards.
By 2016, Kate had started to coyly hint that a baby might be the cherry jam in their Bakewell tart, while Wills was more interested in mastering sourdough hot cross buns. The pair had no television and rarely read the papers. Then, the unthinkable: King Charles was ousted, and William was sternly told by Prime Minister Gwyneth Paltrow that he was obliged to take the throne.
Oh, the pouting, the crying, the bad grace. Kate tried to comfort the future potentate with the idea that he could have kitchenware “out the wazoo” and Gordon Ramsay to do his kneading. But Wills threw himself on the floor, kicking, screaming and manufacturing a stutter in hopes of being excused from the chore. He hated formal ceremonies, despised dignitaries, loathed ballets. He claimed that signing proclamations gave him hangnails.
It was at this point that Kate began to wonder whether she had made the right choice. She was pretty sure she could have had Robert Pattinson.
“My darling, if you don’t wish to be king, I know somebody who’d gladly take your place,” she ventured one morning over steaming bowls of oatmeal topped with homemade marmalade. Tying his “I’m Number One” novelty bib tenderly around his neck as he wept, she placed the sizable crown that served as their paperweight on top of her own shining tresses. “What about me?”
And so we come to the moment in British history when a female commoner took the helm of a faded empire and the country’s wars ended, its hooliganism ceased, and disease became a thing of the past for its suddenly toothsome citizenry.
It wasn’t a bit like the reign of the late Margaret Thatcher.
Palace Virtualis thanks you for your patronage. Please visit our cyber-gift shop on the way out.
