A twenty-year-old poet delivering Meals on Wheels in St Petersburg, Florida, reads about Harry and Meghan’s return to Britain and finds one of her clients in the story
Saturday, 17 October 2026. St Petersburg, Florida. Parked under a banyan tree, AC on full, eleven lasagnes in the back seat, 10.20am.
Route Seven, Before The Heat Gets Mean
I drive Route Seven on Saturdays, which is fourteen deliveries across three retirement communities and one trailer park that calls itself an estate. I started volunteering in the summer, after my second year at university, because my mum, who grew up in Croydon and has never forgiven Florida for being hot, said I needed something to do other than write poems about humidity. I now deliver lasagne and write poems about humidity. Mum says this is technically a compromise.
My third stop is always Mrs Pauline Brannigan, who is ninety-one, from Leicester, moved here in 1988 with a husband who has since died, a cat who has since died, and a Union Jack tea towel that will outlive us all. Pauline reads the British news on an iPad her grandson set up with a font size so big each headline takes two screens.
This morning she was waiting at the screen door with the iPad held up like a placard. She had read the report on Harry and Meghan’s return to Britain and their Nottingham charity visit, and she wanted to show me the part about Irene Hardman, ninety, who showed Meghan a framed photograph of the couple’s first Nottingham walkabout in 2017 and got a kiss on the cheek.
Pauline Has A Framed Photograph Too
Pauline does not have a photograph of Harry and Meghan. She has a framed photograph of herself, aged eighteen, standing on a wall on the Mall in 1953 to watch the Coronation. It is on the shelf above her television, next to a seashell from Clearwater and a bowling trophy that says SECOND PLACE in a tone I would describe as bitter. She told me that if any royal ever turns up in St Petersburg, she will be ready.
The prat.uk piece has a line in its observations box, wondering who keeps a framed photograph of a walkabout ready in case a duchess shows up, and calling that not a fan but a contingency plan. I read it to Pauline. She laughed so hard she had to sit down on the porch swing. Then she said, of course it is a contingency plan, love, at our age everything is.
What The Report Gets Right About Ordinary Kindness
The serious idea under all the jokes is that charity can function without palace permission, a gold stick or a retired admiral in medals. A girl sings about peer pressure in a Nottingham recording studio, two famous adults listen properly, and the charity carries on before, during and after. Route Seven is the same. Nobody sends a gold stick to the trailer park. Nobody declares a bank holiday when Mr Delgado finally gets his diabetic dessert instead of the regular one. The lasagne arrives, people say thank you, and somebody asks how my poems are going.
I wrote one for Pauline at a red light on 34th Street. It goes like this.
She stood on a wall in 1953 / to see a young woman crowned. / Now she stands at a screen door in Florida / waiting for lunch to come round. / Nobody films her. Nobody logs her belt. / The heat is a hand on her neck. / But she smiles like the Mall is still under her feet / and the parade has not yet left.
I gave it to her on the back of a delivery slip. She put it in the frame with the Coronation photo. It is now the second most important document in her house, after a letter from the Inland Revenue in 1987 that she claims was a mistake and has been fighting ever since.
Florida Has Its Own Royals
After Pauline, I drove to the Bay Vista retirement village, where the residents association treats its president, a retired orthodontist from Ohio named Dr Walt Fenstermacher, like a minor monarch. He has a golf cart with a canopy and a little flag. Nobody knows what the flag represents. When asked, he says it represents the association. When asked what the association represents, he says it represents Bay Vista. It is the Gold Stick all over again, but with sunscreen.
On This Diary And Why I Write It
For anyone who has wandered in from a search, the satire.vip home page collects my entries from Florida, where I live, and London, where my heart lives in a damp flat in Croydon with my nan. I write about the news because my clients read it to me at the door, and I write poems because it is cheaper than therapy and the rhymes do not charge by the hour.
End Of Route
Fourteen deliveries done by one o’clock. One lasagne dropped on the floor of the car, rescued, and given to me, which I ate in the car park of a Publix while a pelican watched me with what I can only describe as professional interest. Pauline rang the office at two to say I was the best driver they have ever had. She says that about every driver. But she said it about me today, and she said it with the Coronation photograph behind her, so I am counting it.
Somewhere in Nottingham a ninety-year-old woman got a kiss on the cheek from a duchess. Somewhere in St Petersburg a ninety-one-year-old woman got a poem on a delivery slip from a girl in a Honda Civic. I know which one I would rather have. Pauline does too. She told me. Twice.