Oh come on, please, isn't it time to take those jubilee flags down?

There's a street in Clapham - let's call it The Chase, as that's what it's called - which looks like it has fallen into the hands of extreme royalists. 

At every opportunity -  jubilee, royal wedding, or whatever - these loyal residents organise a street party. Judging from the leaflets circulated for the 2022 event, it was primarily for better-off residents only. Apparently it was a ticketed event, £20 per pop.

For non-royalist residents, this has all become an embarrassment - especially as the organisers like to put plaques on their walls to commemorate the events. One is reminiscent of the revered London Blue Plaque - which somehow devalues those genuine and well-deserved plaques up at the north end of this same street. 

In the past, however, the evidence of these orgies of adoration for the old firm of Windsor would quickly disappear.

This year they went all out for the four-day jubilee, and then some. As usual, huge Union Jacks were strung up across the full width of the road at roof-height - as though this were The Mall, and not just another overpriced south London rat-run. 

Actually the better comparison is Oxford Street, and an even better one, King's Road. All three streets are awash with money and short on taste; their sponsored displays are equally tacky.

Well, OK, for four days you could keep your head down and think republican thoughts as you walked past: or better still take a different route.

But, as if that absurdly prolonged "holiday" were not enough, the massive flags are still there, two  weeks after end of the celebrations. Some of the biggest houses still display tattered bunting and more flags - always union jacks, no other nations getting a look-in.

Worse still, much of bunting was sponsored by an estate agent. The cheapskates! Is not this the height of

Can you believe it? In one of the richest streets in
the rich postcode SW4, they stooped to using
sponsored bunting for the Jubilee party...

vulgarity? But at least it means only one in three of the triangles is a  Union Jack, the rest being PR for the company.

But honestly, how tacky can you get? As one former royal from the 1980s might have quipped, it was all terribly "naff". 

Did I miss something? I thought this street was in the London Borough of Lambeth, and not in some ancient royal borough, all of its own. 

The jubilee week did at least provide an experiment in socio-political prejudices, or demographic stereotypicality. 

Walking around the area, it was interesting to see where the most flags and bunting were. The Chase was the brashest show noticed on a trek from Lavender Hill to Ferndale Road. There were several smaller street parties, though oddly nothing at all in Macaulay road, which is if anything even wealthier than The Chase, in places. Seems the super-duper-rich are more discreet, or more probably celebrating their own wealth somewhere a long way away.

Turret Grove came closest to matching the scale of this street, though its use of multicoloured bunting, pride rainbows and flags of about ten nationalities, seemed far friendlier and more imaginative.  The UK flag seems less grim alongside Spanish, Italian, Jamaican, Scottish, Welsh, German, French, and other national colours. But when it's nothing but the red, white and blue, those of us who associate the flag with the bad old days of the National Front, the BNP, football thuggery, and toxic unionism in Northern Ireland, or toxic Britishness in the colonies, can only shudder. Echoes of Empire are to the fore. 

What for a while was good about Britishness was its post-war reluctance to make too much of a show. Maybe that was also a symbol of war fatigue, or perhaps imperial smugness - you know, we're top dogs so we don't need to wave our flags around. Of course that's all long since gone, and the far right are now more likely to cluster around the St George's flag, it seems. 

Well, the flags remain flapping as I write. Really, do we have to have these constant reminders of the sadly very disunited kingdom we now inhabit, in these sad, shambolic post-Brexit years of widening wealth gap and deepening misery?

* Update July 9 2022: Happy to report the flags came down about a week ago, so they had their full month of loyalist display. Quite surprised to see how many flags are still flying around London - notably in the above mentioned King's Road, Chelsea, where they seem almost a permanent fixture. Maybe they think they hark back to the early stage of 1960s "swinging London", when the flag had a year or two as a mod style icon.

The stupidity of the EU vote: problem one, how to control the rage?

Been feeling physically sick since about 2.30am today when it became clear the "leave" people were going to win.

The feeling, at 7am, that if I didn't look at the internet or turn on the radio, it might not actually have happened.

The feeling, during the day, cycling around south London, that every sighting of a Union Jack or St George's flag triggered an immediate desire to deface it with red or brown paint. You know, a bit of reciprocal vandalism, a sort of childish urge to hit back at the types who have shat all over our (and our children's) futures.

Sadly, many such flags, sodden with the earlier rain, are flapping around in this very street.

A sort of provocation, a squad of dangling insults, these flags were strung out two weeks ago for some snooty street party, ostensibly to celebrate the queen's birthday, actually to celebrate just how frightfully rich most of the residents here are.

And they left the flags up. Last week they seemed merely pathetic, today they seem insulting, in a borough that voted 80 per cent to stay in the EU, that voted overwhelmingly to support and extend the supra-national European project.

So the sodden flags dangle and flap. At least many of them are pink versions of the flag, LGBT jacks perhaps, nice thought, maybe that's OK. The tolerant UK flag. But maybe not....check out the fake blue plaques on a wall at the southern end of this street, celebrating two earlier street parties to celebrate two other events in the life of the dreary Windsor family.

Please, take down these flags!

It's a time to grieve and mourn the destruction of 40 years of efforts to bring people together, to soften borders, to encourage mobility, to increase understanding.