Like the latest tweenie pop sensation, the royal family are better dressed than you, spend a considerable amount of time on the pages of glossy magazines and, as recently evident, also have a sickening amount of fans prepared to dress ridiculously and contract hypothermia for the privilege of spotting them with the naked eye.
The only problem is that, unless each member of the royal family simultaneously decides to never germinate again, they will never go away.
The past weekend's Diamond Jubilee saw a breed of people I thought had vanished with the invention of democracy. Streets were filled with glassy-eyed, Union Jack-stamped royalists warbling about the pride of the nation and, yes, screaming "I love the Queen" with an extraordinary amount of enthusiasm, considering none of them could conjure up a substantial reason why.
"I just love the royal family!" stammered one blue-lipped fan on the verge of collapse. "They keep us together!" exclaimed another. "I am quite convinced she waved at me as she went past!" declared one who must have missed the other million people standing next to her, thanks to an oversized novelty hat.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the statements of devotion towards the Queen and her dynasty were just as cloudy as the reason they still exist in the first place.
In the interest of getting the facts, I went to a source least likely to fill its paragraphs with jargon-filled bollockry, a children's education website.
According to projectbritain.com, although the Queen no longer has real power in terms of governing, "she carries out a great many important tasks on behalf of the nation".
After important task number one of going on nice overseas visits and tasks 2-4 of declaring war on advice of the Government, appointing archbishops chosen by the Government and signing documents because the Government tells her to, her next important task is hosting garden parties, a crucial convention without which the entire Commonwealth would surely crumble.
Figures obtained by the Guardian newspaper show such garden parties are at the moment hovering at a cost of about £600,000 ($1.2 million), per year, and this year's jubilee celebrations are estimated to be about £1.4 billion ($2.8 billion). Considering this and the royal family's ability to considerably outlive the average human being, QE2's 70-year platinum jubilee could well simply involve a public money-burning ceremony because no one in their right mind knows what to do with that amount of cash.
This is where the classic royalist defences are lost. Followers claim the monarchy unites the nation in a way nothing else can, yet if there were no grandiose weddings or elitist public ceremonies think of the alternatives! Surely even a third of the collective jubilee spendings would be enough to send the entire nation on one of those naff team-building retreats where everyone learns how to scale a vertical wall and trust each other. It would at least be enough to buy a large tarpaulin and 62 million cups of tea so everyone could sit down for a nice catch-up.
Then there's the "tradition" thing. Even British Prime Minister David Cameron's hopped on the regal bandwagon, citing the monarchy as a "great institution" above politics and one "that links back into Britain's history and past". Fans of thumbscrews and death by stoning are rejoicing in the hope that their favourite methods of medieval torture may be brought back for the exact same reasons.
Quietly, though, one would hope Cameron's just playing nice for the cameras. If the monarchy were to be overthrown, no one except the monarchy itself and New Idea would be at a particular loss. As the crowds of flag-waving royalists appear ever less lucid, the crowd of active republicans also appears to be quietly growing.
While it may not happen any time soon, there's hope that Britain, New Zealand, and the rest of the Commonwealth will one day be ruled not by the genetic lottery but solely by someone who's truly earned it.
I'm sure David would spend a lot less on hats.
