More Than a Chair

I saw a headline which summarized the coronation as:  'Man puts on hat, sits in chair.'  I was astonished that the incredible intricacy of that ceremony could be so over-simplified.

I'm not making any political statements here - it doesn't matter to me whether a person is a royalist, a republican or an anarchist.  What matters is respect for the military and civilian personnel who worked so hard to create an impressively seamless event.  Acknowledgement that a man in his seventies willingly offered up the rest of his life in service to his country.  Awe at the beauty of that building, that music, those ancient symbols of authority playing their part once again in a ceremony one thousand years in the making.

That chair was built in 1308 by incredibly talented English craftsman.  It was used by Oliver Cromwell in the years when England had no monarch.  Victorian schoolboys carved their names into it.  It was damaged by a bomb, possibly set by suffragettes, in 1914.  It was hidden in Gloucestor Cathedral during  WWII, and in 1950 a group of students stole the Stone of Scone from beneath it.  It represents much of what I admire about British character - creativity, determination, dignity, a bit of irreverence and lot of nerve.

Some people have pointed out to me that a lot of what it represents lies in the past.  Perhaps that's right, but I think it's dangerous to allow the symbols of the past to be scorned or dismissed.  Far better to use them as a sort of magnifying glass to examine who we were.  Doing so will allow us a unique opportunity to see things differently, and come to fresh conclusions about who we are and where we are going. 

Let's see an ordinary chair do that.