The Impertinence Of It All Proudly Presents:

Her Majesty The Queen in,

More Tea, Vicar?

Prrrpt!
“Ey say,” pronounced The Queen from her end of the dinner table, “ey’m sure there was no need for thet!”
“Sorry m’dear,” replied the Duke of Edinburgh, fanning the air about him with his special Duke’s hat, “I’m afraid that dinner tonight was rather rich.”
The Queen had to agree. Although born and bred as royalty even she had to admit that tonight’s turkey stuffed with goose stuffed with swan stuffed with pheasant stuffed with chicken stuffed with bantam stuffed with spatchcock stuffed with quail stuffed with finch ( a turgooswaphechbaspatquanch) had been particularly filling. As she delicately dabbed at her cakehole with the royal napkin, she gave a little belch.
“Aha!” cried Prince Philip and the Duke of Edinburgh at the same time, being as they were the same person and all, “that wasn’t me this time!”
Parp.
“And neither, m’dear, was that.”
“Ey say, ey em most terribly embarrassed,” said The Queen, giving the royal wave, “still, et least this doesn’t look et all suspicious.”
“While you’re at it, wave this one around,” retorted the Duke, curling out a blinder that made the corgis leave the room.
“Oh ey say, you are most terribly awful! One must remember not to layt ey metch!”
“Yes,” said the Prince, leaning back and contentedly enjoying his own brand, “I’d give it about ten minutes if I were you.”
It was at this inopportune moment that the doorbell to Buckingham Palace rang.
“What?” cried The Queen in alarm, “whomsoever could thet be, end et this taym of neyt?”
Quickly The Queen leapt up and ran to the throne room, returning with a can of Glen 20 which she liberally sprayed about the place, finishing just as Jock, the royal retainer, strode into the room, kilt a-flapping. “Ma’am, you have a visitor,” he intoned, “The Archbishop of Canterbury”
“Oh no!” cried The Queen, “How unlucky ken ey get? Just when mey husband end ey get ey dose of the parping great trumpets, the vicar comes to tea!”
One of the few advantages inherent in being The Queen was that rather than hobnobbing with the ordinary clergy, your local vicar was the Archbishop of Canturbury. This came in particularly handy in The Queen’s case as she’d been working on the Archbishop for months, trying to arrange to have Fergie excommunicated. The Archbishop had been pretty firmly in the negative camp at first, but a few evenings of nude Twister at the Palace with Zara Phillips had soon sorted that out and The Queen suspected that tonight was the night and he was ready to sign on the dotted line, as it were.
“Show him in,” The Queen told Jock, then whirled around and shot a warning glance at Prince Phillip, “End ey would strongly edvayse you to put a blummen cork in it.”
“Why?”
“He’s en Erchbishop,” The Queen replied gravely, “he has been raised only on the faynest of things. Were he to ever smell one’s botty-coughs the shock could very well kill him, and thet would be you-know-who’s excommunication up the Swannee, wouldn’t it?”
“But m’dear,” reasoned Prince Phillip, “I’ve been chuffing them out constantly for the last five minutes! I can’t hold my nipsy for that long! My ruddy council gritter will explode!”
“You’ll hold it,” replied The Queen cooly, “until I tell you to stop. Ey’m related to Henery the Eighth, ey em. Besayds, ey’m in the same situation as you.”
At that moment Jock returned, with the Archbishop of Canterbury in tow. “Delightful to see you, The Queen,” the Archbishop began. The Queen hustled him to a seat and began to shovel Albert Cake into him. The Archbishop liked Albert Cake a lot, even thought it took him days to comb all of the crumbs out of his beard.
The evening went well. The conversation began with the latest Formula One gossip, then headed around to the ever-popular subject of Zeppelin design, before The Queen was able to get it around to the red-headed strumpet.
Down below, however, things were not going quite so well. The turgooswaphechbaspatquanch was not sitting well, and the royal ringpiece was taking quite a hammering. The Queen looked across the table to where Prince Phillip sat with his legs and eyes crossed and his face all red.
“And so you see,” mumbled the Archbishop around his third slice of Albert, “I’ve given it a lot of thought and I’ve decided to…”
He was cut off in mid sentence by the loudest cutting of cheese that he had ever heard. Long, deep and sonorous, it sounded like nothing so much as a funeral dirge played solely upon the tuba. On and on it went, reverberating around and around the royal dining room like a sparrow that had gotten in through the window which the Queen was madly chasing with a broom. All up, it lasted for about 35 seconds, with aftershocks. These followed an acute silence.
“More tea, vicar?” asked the Queen to no avail.
The Archbishop had fainted.
“Quickly,” cried the Queen, “Get the embulence!”
“Don’t be silly,” replied the Duke of Edinburgh, “we haven’t got an ambulance.”
Under the sensible guidance of Jock an ambulance was called. As the Archbishop was loaded into the back like so many sacks of spuds, he motioned to Prince Phillip. “Now I know,” he whispered in a scratchy voice from underneath the oxygen mask.
“Know what, old chap?”
“Why you call her ‘cabbage’…”