Sickbed Doodles, Sickbed Logic

I drew this one at 5.30am when I'd finally given up attempting to sleep and decided that I might as well do something more productive with my time. I'm not going to claim it's satire or art when it's really just the feverish scribbling of a man stick of listening to the dawn chorus. I think I should have spent more time on the chin. It's too fat, though that's what I wanted but not to this extent.

All I can say is that at least there are no spelling mistakes. It's a sign of how little sleep I had last night that the heading to my previous article was 'Becow' instead of 'Bercow'. Sounded more like an abbreviation Bart Simpson might use...

The oddest thing about it is that I actually quite like Prince Charles, though I know you're not supposed to mutter such confessions too loudly. It's the old Jeremy Clarkson syndrome: I know I should have plenty of reasons to dislike the man but there's something that holds me back.

My attitude to the monarchy swings with every argument that's made. My mind tells me that I'm a Republican because I don't like systems in which elites hold an advantage at birth. Yet, at the same time, I'm not so naive to assume that all Republics are without their elites. America, our supposed great model of egalitarianism, is regularly ruled by dynasties at all levels but the Roosevelt, Bush, Adams, Kennedy, and Clinton dynasties are the most memorable. A constitutional monarchy feels like a good compromise. If we're going to have a ruling dynasty, we might as well stick with just one and strip them of all power. You could argue it's a cruel duty to impose on somebody but, really, there are far more cruel duties that life imposes on all of us.

In that sense, I'm generally in favour of our monarchy and the alternative would be a dozen times more irritating. It's rare the Queen does anything to piss us off and even if Charles is a little too quick to offer advice to governments, it's a damn sight less headache inducing that having a system like America where there'd be an elected second trough around which we could line up twice as many high-priced pigs.

Even if you accept Charles' meddling, there are other reasons to dislike him which I'm sympathetic to but largely choose to ignore. His support for holistic medicine is one. Another is the nonsense about defending all faiths, given that half the world is in flames because of faiths contesting for the soul of every Joe Pigfarm scraping a living out of the land.

So, yes, Charles is a somewhat bonkers relic of an outdated system which perhaps doesn't represent a modern nation. Yet human life isn't always run by logic alone. There should always been room for a little craziness in the world. We all have to take a one too many nips of the cough syrup and start to draw pointless things at 5.30 in the morning. Charles is anti-modernity, he's never been hip in his life, and he wants to be highbrow and believe in highbrow things. He's a bit like Clarkson: likely to piss of a lot of people who don't believe in his values. Yet it's good to know that there are people who still believe in certain things like British engineering and a kind of rebellious swimming against the tide. It might make us uneasy to defend people like that but he alternative would be a rush for the bottom and a wholesale ubiquity.