How To Avoid the Royal Wedding

If you live anywhere in North America, the easiest way to ignore this week’s nuptials between the apparently affable-but-who-cares Bill Windsor and his pretty-but-I-see-girls-twice-as-gorgeous-on-the-subway-every-day bride Kate can be summed up in two words: Sleep in. That will spare you the processional tedium of the ceremony itself and most of the breathless media hyperbole, but we all know that keeping the event from colonizing our attention for days on either side of the actual spectacle won’t be that easy.

You don’t have to be a republican to detest the Royal Wedding and its wide media blast pattern. It helps, of course, but I’d guess that most of us who’ve dreaded this week for months now haven’t given the political and constitutional context of Bill and Kate’s trip down the aisle as much thought as we’ve simply found our eyes glazing over during discussions of what she’ll be wearing/if he actually loves her/how normal they both appear, God bless ‘em/how dreadful his family is/what we thought about his poor mother, rest her soul/how little we think of his father/how long he’ll have to wait to be king.

If you’re even reading this, chances are your hope for a respite from Royal Wedding mania is already a lost cause, but there’s still time to create a hasty DMZ between you and the media-fed hysteria that’s already turned neighbours, friends, co-workers and even family members into glassy-eyed, forelock-tugging paeans to a bloated ritual display that should have gone the way of harvest tribute and indentured servitude. Move fast, and follow these instructions to the letter, or you might wake up this weekend clutching a crumpled paper union jack and a souvenir mug, with a shameful memory of betraying generations of your ancestors.

1. Avoid all media: Almost no one alive today can remember a time when journalism was essentially a working-class profession, less respectable than dockworkers, and slightly more than press-ganging truant children to split carcasses in rendering plants. It has become a refuge for social climbers with useless degrees, never more nakedly so than when any milestone or calamity befalls a royal, relegating civil wars and revolutions to back pages and “top of the hour” summaries by news anchors.

Just as the Court of St. James is the most envied posting for an American diplomat, the Royal Wedding beat is fought over viciously in newsrooms by hacks who know that more people will read their expose on Kate’s stag and doe party than their prize-winning six-part series on puppy-meat factories run out of orphanages in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Newspapers that have been forced to cut their foreign bureaus and a host of columnists and reporters assigned to cover jazz, dance, theatre, religion, schools and health always seem to find money to retain their society columnist, and when a royal wedding rolls around, budgets can be tortured to accommodate weeks of coverage and at least one collectible pull-out section. CNN has assigned 125 staff to cover the Royal Wedding; they were able to get by with just fifty on the ground in Japan after that country was devastated by an earthquake and tsunami.

It doesn’t end with lapdog media – every cable and broadcast channel will be ramping up the royal-themed coverage this week, with everything from William & Kate: A Royal Engagement to William & Kate: A Modern Romance. For variety, there’s the TV movie William & Kate and Kate: The New Diana. Even TCM is no refuge, with Friday night given over to “Royal Romance” themed programming featuring screenings of Roman Holiday – commoner Gregory Peck falls for princess-in-disguise Audrey Hepburn – and the temptingly convenient Royal Wedding with Fred Astaire. At least the Military Channel was able to resist; they’ve set Greatest Tank Battles to go up against the twilight wedding coverage, and I’m pretty certain that has nothing to do with the Queen Mum.

The only solution is a total black-out: Disconnect the TV and stop the newspapers, kill the newsfeed on your phone, take your browser offline and filter your e-mail so tightly that even those charming messages importuning you for credit information by luckless Nigerian princes head straight to the junk folder. Even better, claim that you’re going off the grid for the week; if you work for the government, the school system or in the arts you can claim it’s a green initiative, and that you’ll be portaging to work every day to get in touch with the pre-industrial future looming when it all goes to hell. If they complain, act offended – no one will dare call you on your bullshit.

2. Avoid British people: The English can be perfectly nice, what with their charming accents and dark, glarey little eyes, but there’s something about royalty that interferes with their restraint and reason. It might, by extension, explain why they’re certain that baseball caps look good in Burberry plaid, that a rock-strewn coastline is a beach, and that David Cameron’s Tories are a conservative government.

My dear friend and colleague Michael Coren is a wonderful man, but he was born in Britain, and occasionally comes out with the most extraordinary things. He’s forever going on about “test matches,” views the world through the prism of something called the “Champions league,” and seems obsessed by the life trials of people with improbable names like “Jordan” and “Wayne Rooney.” It all seems harmless, for the most part, and we just smile and nod when he stops conversations mid-sentence to watch a soccer game, or says things like “You’re Irish – I bet you’d like to kill me.”

It can’t just be geography or diet, so there must be something about growing up under the heel of an anachronistic head of state bred in the twisted innards of a grotesquely toxic family that encourages otherwise sensible, amusing people to become abject and even humourless at the mere suggestion that another heir to this sorry state of affairs is in the offing. Either that or they’re playing an enormous joke on us. It’s happened before – how else do you explain Piers Morgan?

3. Be a dude: Simple fact – those early Friday morning wedding viewing parties in pubs and restaurants all over your city will look more like a sale at a Kate Spade warehouse outlet than Super Bowl Sunday. If you’re a heterosexual male, chances are that any Royal Wedding chatter you’ve heard over the last few months has sounded like a garbled ham radio transmission, and a glance at your wife or girlfriend’s Kate-themed copy of Hello! has triggered the onset of what doctors call “topical dyslexia,” with the words jumbling and reversing and the photos blurring into undifferentiated masses of colour.

Most women won’t admit it, but it’s likely that some of their Royal Wedding mania is a sham, which shouldn’t be surprising from people who can fake orgasms. They’ve pretended to be interested when you’ve raved about the Habs’ odds this year or Star Wars or Top Gear, so this is their chance to be unreasonably obsessed with something completely ridiculous, for which you can’t even hope to feign a moment’s anthropological curiosity.

They’ll all arise on Friday morning like some zombie army, even if they’ve insisted to you that they “totally don’t care,” and will make their way to a TV or computer screen, clutching a box of tissues and a stash of chocolate they hid from you in their tampon box. I live in a house full of women and can’t take any chances; besides cancelling the newspaper and cable, I’ve installed heavy deadbolts on the bedroom doors and booby-trapped the stairs. I’ve encased our cellphones in blocks of nitrogen, which freezes at -346°F and will blister and burn the skin on contact. Anyone in my situation knows that you can’t take any chances.