And now a message from the Queen to her commonwealth

[We now cut to a live broadcast from Buckingham Palace or maybe Windsor Castle. Somewhere like that anyhoo.]

Twenty eighteen has been a year of centenaries. The Royal Air Force celebrated its 100th anniversary with a memorable fly-past demonstrating a thrilling unity of purpose and execution. We owe them and all our Armed Services our deepest gratitude not least for which is the Royal Navy’s gallant defence of our shores from the monstrous Kraken, who betentacled evil so threatened our shipping in Eighteen eighteen. Many young people today will only be familiar with more modern threats to our island home or to the many nations of the commonwealth. My own grandson His Royal Highness The Duke of Sussex prefers to call such creatures ‘kaiju’ but in the long traditions of my family, I prefer to see such monsters as part of a tradition that dates back to the times of Grendel and dragons.

I have with me today, my dear, dear friend Timothy the Talking Cat. Timothy is a welcome source of comfort and advice to me in these troubling times. To reduce the malign psychic influence of the Satsuma Spider God, Timothy will be playing some distracting tunes on the enchanted piano behind me. This piano was carefully built by a Masonic cult led by Mozart and the re-animated corpse of Doctor John Dee. We would like to take a moment to once again thank Doctor Dee for his continued service to the monarchy despite his death several centuries ago.

The piano’s strength lies in the bonds of affection it promotes, and a common desire to live in a better, more peaceful world. Even with the most deeply held differences, treating the other person with respect and as a fellow human (or otherwise) being is always a good first step towards greater understanding.

Indeed, the Commonwealth Games, held this year on Australia’s Gold Coast, are known universally as the Friendly Games because of their emphasis on goodwill, mutual respect and capacity to band together to ward off the “Seven Plagues of Brisbane”: giant mutated sea-turtles, a tropical cyclone full of sharks, undead cane toads, a cyborg Elon Musk angry at the horror of his own existence, a supernatural beer shortage, the ghost of Harold Holt covered in seaweed and the impending spread of high house prices from Sydney.

Some may say that the numerous banes, blights and Brexits impreliling our realms are simply the psychic backwash from the spiritual sceptic tank of British Imperial history, rising up from the underworld like a backed-up sewer, seeking to overwhelm our land with centuries of repressed and revised history transformed into phantasmagorical creatures.

To that I would reply that those critics who make such assertions have never truly seen the darkness that I have when I first gazed upon the entity that we have locked and warded in the huge cavern beneath Balmoral. There are those who would contend that the monarchy is out of touch or an institution of a bygone age whose time has passed. To those of my subjects who find themselves so sadly deluded about the true nature of reality let me ask you this.

When the creatures of the void break through the veil of cosmogyny and come to rend your essence from your bones and then marke sport with your skeleton while your howling soul looks on, to whom would you turn? Your milquetoast post-modernist professors? Your “Jeremiah Corbills”? Your “republicans” and constitutional reformers?

Or instead will you turn to a family that are the heirs to Boudicca, King Arthur, William the Conqueror, or my namesake Glorianna herself Elizabeth the First? A family who’s every scion is sent to brutalizing residential schools and then forced into military service? A family that has hoarded every single object of eldritch power from every corner of the Earth into the world’s greatest thaumaturgical armoury?

Yup, thought so. You cling to us because like the cowards you are you know we are the one thing that stands between you and the horrors beyond.

Now let the smoothing music lull you back into a slightly disgruntled aura of obedience. These words will seep into your subconscious and all you will remember is some bland words of togetherness.

A very happy Christmas to you all.