As England plunges further into poverty, even magpies sing in God Save The King

Bring it on!

Perhaps I am so looking forward to watching Charles III's coronation (the triumphal music! The pageantry! The absurdly charming make-believe of the hundreds of mentions of a God who doesn't exist!) in part because I saw nothing of his dear mother's extravaganza of pomp and ceremony.

The new-fangled miracle of television reception had still not been extended to my remote and backward rural-coastal East Anglian corner of England when Elizabeth's coronation came to pass on June 2, 1953.

Of the UK's then-population of 50 million, around 20.4 million people watched at least half an hour of the coronation service. And since there were only 2.7 million bulbous little television sets in the UK, that meant an average of seven and a half people to a set, often at living-room television parties.

Even had the miracle of television been extended by then to my little town, we wouldn't have been able to watch it in our house. Our ye olde rack rented terrace cottage was not connected to the boon of electricity and so would have had nothing to plug the modern contraption into.

Just as well, since a blaring TV would have unnerved our home's bats, happily at home in the dingy rafters in ceilings never well illuminated by gaslight and candles.

And in another column in another edition, and wondering why on earth I don't hate the Royal family for the obscenity of its wealth and privilege, I had this sudden thought. At the moment of the Queen's coronation in 1953, my family lived in accommodation probably inferior to that given to Her Majesty's family's glossily-groomed select assortment of thoroughbred racehorses.

Just like us, those horses were living in North Norfolk (they were ensconced at the royal residence, Sandringham, just along the coast from us). But there the resemblance ended, for as well as surely having electrically lit and warmed stables, one feels sure their floors' straw was changed far more frequently than we could afford to change ours.

But my living circumstances are considerably better now. Thank you, Australia!

Here, in my comfortable electricity-blessed cottage in an aspirational suburb of Australia's federal capital city, I twitchingly await the televised entertainment of this second coronation of my lifetime.

In 1953, the-then Archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher was opposed to the televising of the coronation, growling to reporters that "The world would be a better place if television had never been invented".

Perhaps he felt (and who can disagree with him?) that the invention of TV is one of the works of the Devil.

But then, human inequality, too, is surely the Devil's doing. On the very morning last week of hearing distressing new statistics of how many Australians have nowhere to live, I learned that in death Her Majesty leaves behind her hundreds of racehorses.

All foaled at the Royal Stud in Sandringham (where my poor family's aristocratic four-legged superiors were living in 1953) they are no doubt sumptuously housed and dotingly looked after in no-expense-spared ways. Meanwhile at this moment in the UK there are 274,000 homeless people in England alone, with dire predictions of deeper poverty to come.

But enough of this. If at a moment like this one dwells on matters of class, rank and station, inequality and injustice one will go mad. God Save The King!

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Speaking of which; one morning last week, sitting in a wattle-bedecked spot in the National Arboretum and thinking as we all are at the moment of royal occasions I tuned my device to a YouTube playing of Beethoven's Seven Variations For Piano on "God Save The King".

Always a treat to listen to, it was enhanced on this special occasion by the arrival at my feet of an Australian magpie. Surreally, but loyally, he or she began warbling along with the melodies being trilled and hymned by the soloist at his Steinway.

With serial playings and singings of God Save The King underway right now, this is the perfect time to acquaint or reacquaint ourselves with Beethoven's bedazzling Variations of this most famous of tunes.

YouTube offers lots of performances. The magpie and I chose to listen to Cédric Tiberghien's melodic ripper, readily available to you through another work of the Devil, YouTube.

The beauty of listening to all the things (pomp and mischief, perkiness and majesty) that Beethoven could hear lurking in the tune and that his Variations liberate is that for ever after the tune stays forever enlivened for us whenever we hear it. Eight minutes of wonder. Beethoven said he wanted to "show the English what a blessing they have with that tune".

Wistfully, one wonders what melodic treasures he would have found, setting them free and frolicking, in our hitherto tunelessly plodding Advance Australia Fair.

Of course the musical highlight of the keenly-awaited coronation will be the playing and singing of Handel's mighty, Abbey-rattling Coronation Anthem Zadok The Priest.

"God save the king! Long live the king! May the king live for ever! Amen, amen, alleluia, alleluia, amen!"

One has to be impossibly thick and insensitive not to be thrilled (even if most of the time one is an atheist and a republican) by this soul-thrumming anthem.

I was about to get Zadok up on my device for the magpie to singalong with. But then he or she, perhaps having exhausted its loyalist energies with its virtuoso warbling of God Save The King (and aren't we all feeling a little royalty fatigue at the moment?) flew away into the golden floral pomp and pageantry of the wattle trees.