I’ve been to many a castle. It’s what you do in Europe when your parents feel the need to educate you about history. It’s what you do as a tourist - you go to castles and churches, because that is where history was made, apparently. Both castles and churches range from the splendid to the almost nonexistent. The splendid ones are full of boring wonders. The others are ruins, though still beautiful in their state of borderline nonexistence. Even in the splendid ones you can’t help feeling a little lonely. You almost never meet a king. The clerics you see don’t look like anything in the exquisitely painted pictures hanging from the walls. The buildings sound like empty shells, even when they’re filled to the brim with gold and skeletons. You and the other tourists are of little help, with all your cluelessness and stupefaction. What’s going on?

You don’t find out till you see: the kings have moved to the tabloids. They carry babies out of birth clinics and visit pig farms. They do many things commoners do too, like eating, marrying and skiing. When properly addressed, they have longer names than the commoners, but the tabloids call them “Sophia” and “George”. This wouldn’t happen to usual people. The clerics have moved to TV. Mostly they’ve taken to preaching from balconies, in Latin nonetheless. Some of them, on a regular basis, feel the need to profess their concerns about who takes whom to bed. It’s slightly confusing, really, and you can’t even be sure it’s totally harmless.