Scroll 12 Songtext

The Twelfth Scroll — My Mother My Dead Mother

England's former capital once served as haven and headquarters for uncountable unwanted royalty. Among the more picturesque to have fetched up in London a skip ahead of the pitchforks and tumbrils were Zog the First of Albania, Napoleon the Third of France, Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, Plastique Bertrand the Fifth of Belgium. It is, for this reason, an especially cruel blow to the house of Windsor when they join the ranks of monarchs without portfolio, relieved of their duties and ceremonial cutlery in the defenestration of 2006.

All exile is lonely, but internal exile is especially excruciating, confined to the margins of the land you either ruled, or expected to. Rattling around mouldy palaces, stripped of all titles, deserted by all but the most venal or unemployable of courtiers, the decrowned head is forced to fill itself with board games, flirtations with fascism, dabblings in the occult, and the composition of self-pitying memoirs doomed to remain as unread as they are unreadable.

The next scroll is a first draft of such an autobiography. It hints at things which, frankly, no decent person should wish to know any more about.