The life of a Grenadier Guardsman on duty at Buckingham Palace is no cakewalk. It entails purposeless marching about in a property that is well policed by other means. And there are long periods of standing absolutely still — nothing but breathing and blinking allowed, and absolutely no scratching under that bearskin shako. In these periods of stasis, they are beset by foreign tourists who get photographed with them while making faces and assuming absurd poses. Their brief is to remain inhumanly still in the face of all cross-border provocation.
But now, a Guardsman who departed from the script to entertain tourists may get his marching orders. He marched in slo-mo and pirouetted playfully when the queen was away in Scotland. What could be more natural than to break away from the daily grind, to get a spring in one’s stride? But even the human rights wallahs don’t understand. Agreed, Buck House is the official residence of the British monarch and the Guards do, er, have to guard it. They intervened incisively only this April, holding off at bayonet point a Nigerian in search of a private audience. They had famously failed on the night of July 9, 1982, when Michael Fagan broke into the queen’s bedroom, caught her in her nightie and drank her Famous Grouse (that’s Fagan’s version).
