We’re travelling as a strictly un-extended family. Recipients are allowed to bring three guests, so it’s Dad, brother Tom and me. Easily done. I wonder what happens to honorees with larger families – do they draw lots, toss a coin, or argue over a lifetime of point scoring about just who’s been emotionally closer or more supportive to the one getting the medal (‘You’ve never been there for Cousin Eustace like I have’)? Are family tensions thus exposed, maybe even brought to a head?
I also muse on just how we’re meant to behave. As it is, The Edwards family rarely does things in the original four-piece line-up, not since I left home circa 1990. I think of that wonderful line in ‘Little Miss Sunshine’: ‘Off we go! Everyone pretend to be normal!’. I also think of ‘The Daytrippers’, a lesser known (but I think superior) movie along the same lines: a family of slightly unusual characters getting in a car and going off together.
But how IS a family meant to act as a one-off travelling unit, particularly when the sons are grown up? Particularly when one son is a louche bohemian and bedsit loner who writes a decade-old web diary, while the other is happily married, employed, has a house, and rarely travels without his wife. Though Tom does have an unconventional job: he currently plays guitar for Fields Of The Nephilim. Full-time, now.
Tom’s just come back from a sold-out gig at Shepherd’s Bush Empire and a tour in Finland. I’ve just come back from escorting Shane MacGowan from Dublin to New York and back. And Dad’s just come back from a rather less fun trip: he was rushed to hospital after suddenly contracting a dysentery-like virus, suspected to be one of the so-called ‘superbugs’.
But all three Edwards Men have made it to be here. Just. The London traffic threatens to make us miss out at the last hurdle, when we endure a nerve-wracking half-hour in a gridlocked Bloomsbury.
We make it to the Mall, a little late but not too late. We show our passes and drive in past the crowds of tourists and several gates manned by police – a nice feeling – into an inner courtyard. Tom is told by security to leave his car unlocked, with his keys visible on the dashboard. There’s armed officers standing guard, guns on view. It’s fair to say Tom’s not worried about his car being stolen.
Inside the Palace, Mum is led off with the other recipients, while the Guests – me, Tom and Dad – have to walk down a hall and take our seats in a ballroom. THE ballroom as it turns out. Weeks later while staying in the Hague, I idly flick through the hotel room TV channels to catch a news report on BBC World. Then I see the ballroom again. Mum’s MBE ballroom. The Palace is just about to open it to the public for the first time, as part of its guided tour. So Mum’s investiture ceremony is one of the last before this milestone in the room’s history.
‘We do this sort of thing so well,’ says Dad, as we gaze around at the high ceilings and huge paintings. But unlike the other historical mansions I’ve visited – and in the case of Kenwood have worked in – Buckingham has an air of practicality and use. It’s ornate and plush, of course, but there’s the feeling of business (and indeed, busyness) afoot. Investitures, banquets, visiting dignitaries and so on – it’s all work. A working palace.
