The King's coronation calamity: an afterparty disaster

Why ascending monarchs should never, ever invite me to their coronation

This is a good one to listen to, because I do a better King Charles impersonation than King Charles himself:

“Tea, sir?” I startle awake at the sound of his voice and the metallic zing of the blinds being ruthlessly torn open, and I shield my eyes against the sudden assault of daylight unleashed by this stiff sounding intruder. I’m desperately dehydrated, and my mouth feels as though a cat had shed in it, but I did not like this offer one bit. 

“I’d rather drink bleach,” I croak. “Tea is joyless.” I hear the tea tray and all its gratuitous bits clang down onto the bureau opposite the bed. 

“Perhaps a robe, then,” he responds. I look down and realize I’m buck naked atop a coarse, ornate bedspread that was probably painstakingly woven by one of his ancestors in the 1800s. 

“Can I have a cappuccino?” I plead as a robe falls out of the sky and upon me. 

“There’s a lovely cafe called New Acre nestled into Westminster Chapel on Buckingham Gate at Castle Lane,” he says, flatly. “If you walk briskly you’ll be sipping one within 10 minutes of checkout time.” This is frightening information. 

“There’s a checkout time?” I ask, incredulous. Here I thought I was an invited guest of the King, and I’m being treated like a trucker at a Motel 6. 

“Not a formal one, but Queen Camilla has asked that everyone who looks like Prince Harry and sounds like an American vacate the palace before noon luncheon,” he says. 

“This sounds very pointed,” I respond, trying to remember if I did anything to offend the Queen consort last night, but also trying to remember…anything. 

“Indeed, sir,” he says. “A butler will be with you in fifteen minutes to help you with your bag.” I hear his footfalls followed by the thud of the giant door closing. I sit up too quickly and squint against the sun, cursing my pupils for not constricting faster. I look around the room. One cufflink glimmers in the late morning light on the bedside table next to my wallet. My shirt and pants are strewn out on the floor in the shape of a homicide. My boxers cling precariously to one of the bed posts. Just as I’m about to attempt to stand and hunt for my second cufflink, the door bursts open. 

“Fucking hell,” says King Charles. “I’ve lost the fucking crown.” I blink to make sure I’m not hallucinating.

“Well, that was a short reign,” I quip. 

“No, you absolute twat, the actual crown,” whines the monarch. “I can’t tell anyone else because they’ll lose their shit.” The sovereign, dressed in his silk royal blue jimjams, slumps against the door and shakes his clenched fists like a toddler. “Ghastly, fucking ghastly.” 

“Well, let’s think through the evening,” I say, slipping on my underwear beneath the robe. The King groans. 

“I wanted to put one of those - one of those fucking white electronic tracking thingies on it -”

“AirTag?” I offer as I gingerly slide off of the cliff that is the absurdly tall bed to begin the hunt for my socks and any memory of the preceding night.  

“Yes, that, but Camilla used the last one on her granddaughter.” I find my socks hanging from a lamp, and the only thing unaccounted for at this point is my cufflink, which honestly feels from a utility standpoint far more pressing than the king’s silly hat. 

“Her granddaughter?” I ask. 

“Oh you know, big house, small child, rubbish memory - FUCK!” King Charles paces back and forth across the room, walking over my shirt and pants like roadkill. I grab them quickly after his second lap. Memories start coming back to me. 5H. Mezcal. French fries. Mick Jagger. 

“We didn’t go anywhere after 5H, right?” I ask. “We just came straight back here.” For anyone who isn’t posh and vapid, 5H - or 5 Hertford Street - is the most exclusive members club in London and thus the most insufferable and entertaining establishment in the world. It’s where aristocrats and nouveau riche social-climbing commoners go to be just awful away from the prying eyes of plebs. 

“I don’t even like 5H,” moaned the vestigial figurehead. “Loulou’s is so bloody dark, I can’t see anything down there,” he says of 5H’s subterranean nightclub.

“I think that’s the appeal, your majesty,” I said, remembering my manners and wondering if I needed to use these royal formalities with him after doing shots like belligerent college students all night. I had basic the sequence of events sorted out. We’d gone from the coronation to Lanes of London to pick up chips (that’s British for french fries; American chips are called crisps, which actually makes sense from a sensory experience perspective), and then directly to 5H. “Did you check the carriage?”

“Yes of COURSE I did you condescending urchin,” shouts the petulant monarch. “It’s got to be at 5H. We must go have a look.”

“It’s Sunday, though - it’s closed,” I said, not wanting to miss the narrow cappuccino window between waking and the onset of a caffeine deprivation headache, which would exacerbate my Mezcal Negroni headache. 

“Don’t be daft, Birley gave me a key when it opened,” he utters. “Get bloody dressed, we’re going to find that pompous fucking hood ornament.” I still hadn’t found my cufflink. With my French cuffs rolled up, I feel like a third year analyst at Goldman Sachs at 2am on a Tuesday circa 2006, but state duty called. 

“Maybe you want to wear a hat or something?” I say, passive aggressively pretending to forget the circumstances. “Oh - sorry, didn’t mean to rub it in.” King Charles shoots me a look and grabs from my dresser the one-of-a-kind blue baseball cap with the panther head made of beads that a dear friend had given me in Oaxaca. 

“Lovely shade of blue, it will make my eyes pop,” he says as he pulls it onto his head. Now the anxiety of not being properly caffeinated is heightened by the anxiety of potentially losing my favorite hat to the King of England. This was shaping up to be the worst coronation I’d ever been to. 

We exit my room and tip-toe down the hallway, which is about the length of three of those red double-decker buses that poor people take. 

“We must cross the garden to the mews where the cars are,” whispered the king. 

“What the fuck is a mews?” I asked. 

“Stables,” he responded. 

“You keep cars in-”

“Fucking GARAGE, for fuck’s sake - have you not been to England before?” My face flushes. I’ve spent so much time in London that I have the Santander Cycle app on my phone, at least two exes - one in East London and one in the West End, and a frayed loyalty card from Bulldog Coffee in Shoreditch that needs only one more punch before entitling me to a free coffee. Which reminds me - I really fucking need a cappuccino. 

We round the corner and almost run into a maid. She looks suspiciously at me first and then notices the king. “Oh! Good morning, sir,” she blurts out and curtsies. “Didn’t recognize you in that – hat?” The king makes a sort of “mhm” noise without breaking stride. 

“We’ll take the footman lift all the way to the basement,” he tells me, eyes darting around like a common criminal. “A lift is what you people call an el-e-va-tor,” he pedantically explains as we approach a small, semi-hidden door. He presses a button and the door pops open. We step into an awkwardly small, spartan cab and it jerks downward. 

“It’ll turn up,” I say, regretting it immediately.   

“Of fucking course it will, bloody thing is worth 4 billion pounds,” he snarls. “One doesn’t just lose these things.” Well, one does, apparently, but I keep my mouth shut. 

The lift deposits us into a much less grand hallway, and we follow it to a narrow spiral staircase that opens into the mews, which contains a gleaming collection of carriages and motorcars. “We’ll take my Aston - you’ll drive, I’ll hide behind the seats.”

“What if the guards stop me?” I ask, suddenly very nervous. 

“Just wave at them like this,” he says and raises his arm, rotating his hand at the wrist in that weird way that only royals and the pope do. “They’ll think you’re Harold,” he says, gesturing with disdain at my head, “what with that shock of ginger hair.” 

The vintage Aston Martin DB6 convertible growls to life as King Charles growls behind the seats. The stable door seems to open automatically, but I see a butler waving me through it. 

“Mawnin’, Prince Harry! Nice to have you back, sir!” I smile and wave the rotating hand wave above the windshield. I drive a little faster than I normally would, hoping to seem assertively royal as we pass by a few more guards. 

“Hallo, Hazzah!” says another guard. I’m not sure I appreciate his informality. I glower at him.

The drive to 5H would be maybe four minutes if we could just cut through the palace garden but it’s a solid 15 minutes on roads. More of the night is coming back to me as I shift through the gears, enlivened by the purr of the finely-tuned motor, the pungent smell of its bioethanol exhaust and the knowledge that the King of England is tucked into a fetal position a few inches behind my ass. 

The Coronation itself was super fucking dull. Lots of mumbo jumbo and dusty old books and cheesy looking scepters. The procession was long. The Coronation lunch was rather bland, because English food. Lionel Richie put on a good show, for a fossil. The whole day would have been a waste of time if Willy hadn’t suggested 5H. 

“Fucking splendid idea,” the King had said, and immediately created a Telegram group for the folks he wanted at the afters–all party friends, which excluded Camilla and Harry. We held court - quite literally - on the third floor in the room to the right of the stairs–the one with the striped sofa against the windows so that no one could sneak up on us. Keith Richards turned up along with Gordon Ramsey and Boris Johnson, who together sort of look like blond muppet twins or a stately Scandinavian lesbian couple. There was a spate of young and beautiful socialites - all with names like Poppy and Cressida and Caroline and Milly - and their incredibly dull Etonian boyfriends who do not work. It was a good time, though, and Calvin Harris played Loulou’s that night, which seemed poetic given the King’s affinity for Scotland. 

It was also the first time I saw a first-tier (vs like, Luxembourg) reigning monarch do ketamine, but - as they say in England - the king was a veritable Hoover, hogging Willy’s snogo and entirely cashing Bojo’s pile of k. I didn’t understand why someone so naturally dissociated would want to be even further removed from reality, but I guess coronations are stressful, and subjects are annoying. 

I dimly remember Mick Jagger turning up uninvited and there being a scuffle between him and Keith, which the King broke up. It was weird to see three elderly men in a fight. I was worried that one of them would break a hip. 

I park in a loading zone in front of 5H and help the King out of the back. 

“Fuck, I’ve buggered my back,” he says as I exhume him from his confines. 

We walk around the corner to the club entrance on Shepherd Market. We don’t even need the key; it’s wide open. A maintenance man is replacing a window that was apparently broken last night. He looks up at us. 

“Well, well, well, if it ain’t mister party pants,” he says to King Charles with a smirk. “Come to make amends, your majesty? You’re fuckin’ lucky I don’t charge you for this window straight away.” The King looks puzzled. 

“What the absolute fuck are you talking about?” he asks. 

“You or one of your mates broke this window, sir,” says the toothless maintenance man. “No one told me if it was you or Keith or Mick, but it was definitely you lot. Came downstairs like a fucking tornado, I heard.” 

“Sorry, but I don’t give a flying fuck about your shitty window, I’ve left something upstairs,” says the King as he steps through the door. I hang back.

“Is there anyone in the club who could make me a cappuccino, or?” I ask timidly. 

“Oh, let me just pop back into the kitchen and whip one right up for you, I take it you like yours with oat milk, innit?” For a moment I think he’s serious, and relief washes over me. “How about you fuck right off to Starbucks with that American actress you married, ya mopey ginger knob.” I contemplate deserting the King and actually finding a coffee shop, but I remember my luggage and passport are still at Buckingham Palace. I head up the stairs and find the King has entirely disassembled the sofa we were sitting on. Did he really think a 5-pound solid gold crown would be under a cushion? 

“Fuck!” yells the King. I pretend to search in solidarity through the array of disembodied cushions and notice a flicker of silver in the bowels of the sofa. 

“Ha!” I yell, holding up my cufflink. 

“Oh, lovely,” says King Charles, “I suppose we can be on our way now that you’ve found your cufflink.” 

“Really?” I ask, hopefully, feeling the caffeine headache coming on. 

“No!” he shouts. “Find my fucking crown, or I’ll have your head!” It seems things are escalating. I sit down and close my eyes, trying to piece together the rest of the night. I dimly remember Keith doing an impression of the Queen and a game of truth or dare that yielded a confession that KC had poisoned her, and I definitely made out with one of the socialites and her boyfriend. 

And then it came to me. 

At the peak of the afterparty, I had hushed the room and called for a vote on who should actually be the King of England: Mick or Charles. Based on drunken cheers, Mick won in a landslide, and in his dissociated state, King Charles had literally abdicated to Mick and handed him the crown.  

“Mick has it,” I announce, my face in my hands.  

“What?” asks the King. “Why the bloody hell wou-” and then he remembers, too. “Oh, fuck. That little twat will never give it back.” He sighs and his already slumped shoulders slump even more. 

“Bummer,” I say, sympathetically. “Can we get a coffee now?” 

“Maybe a croissant will make me feel better,” says King Charles. 

We walk down the stairs, defeated. The King hands the maintenance man a tenner on the way out. 

“For the broken window,” he says to him. The maintenance man looks at me wide-eyed. 

“Does he know I can’t even buy a fucking fish ‘n chips with a fucking ten pound note?” 

“Of course not,” I say. “He’s probably had that same tenner in his pocket since 1974.”

The King crawls into the Aston behind the seats, and I head to Arro Coffee on Curzon to finally get a fucking cappuccino and get the King a croissant, which I know will be bready and horrible, because despite its proximity to France, England would sooner sink than make a decent croissant. 

I return to the car and hand the croissant back to the King. “Mmmmm, yummy yummy,” he says as I start the motor. 

“You can just Venmo me the 4 quid,” I say.

“You can just eat shit,” he responds.

The drive back to Buck feels much shorter. The sun came out for nineteen seconds, my caffeine headache was averted, and I found my cufflink. I’m feeling cocky and want to test my luck impersonating an outcast royal, so I drive right up to the palace gates. As I’m turning in, I notice a frail, oddly dressed man who reminds me of a peacock and appears burdened by a heavy looking Tesco bag. On closer inspection, I see that it’s Mick Jagger. 

“Oy, give this to daddy for me,” says Mick and lobs the bag into the passenger seat. “Not my style, mate.” He grins broadly and tips the hat that he isn’t wearing. 

“Cheers,” I say as the gates opens.  

“Who was that?” asks a muffled King Charles from behind the seats. “What was that about?”

“Oh, just a homeless guy who wanted me to give you a - uh, jumper,” I say. 

“Ghastly,” he says. “Throw it out of the car, or keep it as a souvenir if you like,” says King Charles, snickering. 

I decide to keep it. And he can keep my hat. It’s a fair trade, given they’re both one of a kind.