Prince William's Terrible Dad Dancing is a Painful Reminder of Our Own Mortality

Every morning I wake with a groan and a new ache. My knees, fingers, shoulders, hips, my ankles, back, neck—all these things creak and croak, and the day ahead of me feels like nothing more than another dismal helping of misery-inducing gruel, a grey and grisly bowl of slop I'm forced to wolf down and told to enjoy. The birds sing outside, because they do not understand suffering. Their singing makes me groan even more. I groan and groan and groan and groan and groan and groan until my throat is hoarse and groaning is too painful, so I groan no more. Instead, I seethe. I seethe in the shower. I seethe on the bus. I seethe at my desk. I seethe in bed. I seethe in my dreams. And then I get up and groan and ache. And this will happen until the very final groan. Then it is soil and rot and eventually nothing. Nothing at all.

My morning groan was louder than usual today and the reason for that was simple. Video footage of Prince William dancing badly has emerged. The footage itself is unremarkable; grainy truth captured on a greasy phone. The future monarch dances with a woman who isn't his wife. He dances like your dad dances at weddings. Or would, if your dad wasn't such a miserable sod. OK then, he dances like dad's dance in sitcoms or in films. And that, apparently, is funny. It is funny that a cloistered and fusty member of the royal family dances badly. Look, the video says, here is the famous man doing something non-famous people do. He is just like us. He is so much like us that we must capture him doing this normal thing to show how totally normal it is. Here he is, in a fancy Swiss ski resort, dancing like your dad does in Didsbury. Isn't that fantastic. Isn't it it just marvellous that the footage has emerged via The Sun? Isn't it brilliant to think that right now, Jimmy Carr's slavish team of gag-writers are furiously brainstorming a take or ten on the dancing? Isn't it all so very, very, very good?

No. It isn't. Prince William's dad dancing is making me think about death. Your dancing dad will die. Prince William will die, too, just like you and your dancing dad, and your dancing dad's very own dancing dad. There is nothing in this world but a series of dead or dying dancing dads. That is all there is, and all there ever will be.

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