A I can see that arched brow thrumming from up here on my  martyrs hill, Barry.   😉

First of all ‘principled’ artists reminds me of my old mother-in-law who declared she had ‘Blood Pressure’.

My internal chat then would have been all about ‘I should think so too. What with you being stood up’, and such.

As with blood pressure, all living people have principles of some potency or another. The existence of a shared principle in itself does not signify common decency or accord, it is the nature of the principle that applies to the question in hand.

As all artists are people and all people have principles I declare myself a Principled Artist. As you too are Person I know you to be principled, though not what your job is. What we don’t know reliably between us is where our principles converge, where they confound, where they may appall and where we should better seal our mouths and not speak to nuance.

Our principles can be inherited, learnt, or realised, or are mutated for our own ends.

How we will forgive a flaw in an ally, but not allow the same gift to an adversary.

Principles are cultural. For some patriarchs and their willing chattel, a woman having autonomy over her body, for example,  is an affront to their dearly adhered to tenets. For me, the denial of that human right is perverse and immoral. Obscene. Unprincipled. Yet both positions are indeed ‘principled’.

A joy of getting old is not having to navigate, eyes-closed, these universal incongruences and still feel compelled to deny that they abide in all of us, in order to maintain my moral high ground and shame the other.

So, I shall answer this with the principle of honesty. The one we all cherry pick to number in our personal jamboree bag of Upstanding.

No. I didn’t consider turning it down. I have reasons that adhere to my held principles and others that don’t engage any. I considered armouring myself here with iterations of highly admirable tax paying ethics, but that would be wank.  I’ve inferred it though now. Consider it as me arranging my nuts rather than full on frottage, if you will.

The common pot is vital and fairly contributing to it should not be waved like a club flag of personal largess by anyone. We all take from it.

I didn’t consider turning it down. I always wanted this award like I always wanted an O-level or an A-level. Or the face for a part time job in my youth. Or a DofE experience. To understand punctuation and to spell reliably. Not to be the last selected on the team. A part in the school play. A seat on the Choir. To not wear out my welcome. To be numbered amongst my peers beyond pop chart penury. With the Artists who weren’t Mega-Ton-Moyet in the press when fat did not get claxon-free outings and you avoided being seen because the sightings never came without public humiliation.

The musicians that weren’t asked in interviews if they were ashamed to be seen on stage looking the way I do, but rather about their work or what they have made happen.

Add it to ‘I always wanted’.

Along with swimming the channel.

Some dreams die.

Like having a son called Steve.

I grew out of that and the English channel.

It happens.

This has been my juvenile bleat. The events that inform life-long social anxiety and stubborn feelings of inadequacy. The wanky-whiney adolescent me that blames all others as persecutor before recognising my otherness was not merely their projections.

I think we all have that martyr in our saddle-bags. That self-obsessed youth of some description or another. 

It is the child that wants. This badge is a gift I can take for that girl. It is not a principled choice any more than owning a car is, or taking a foreign holiday.

I am by nature impulsive, but this choice was not. It is not for the good of others. I took it for myself. Absolutely.

But it doesn’t hurt young, ‘ugly’, excluded, neuro-diverse, unqualified, drop-outs to see one of their own eventually recognised by a society that does not often raise them.

To see that you can and will fail but it need not be your end story.

It doesn’t hurt Basildon to be reminded that it always had more to own than the national derision it anticipates on polling day.

It doesn’t hurt.

‘Turn it down’ was certainly the hope of a number of my clan who are anti-royalist, but more pertinently anti-the-current-government administration.

I have been on stage for 43 years and don’t define my career by the last two where music has been set aside.

There was no celebration or glasses raised, neither a dirty burger had, but yes, it is appropriate for them to adhere to their political tenets. I expect nothing less.

We women (I speak as woman as that is my class experience but am sure it speaks to many groups) spend a massive part of our lives being coerced by someone else’s privilege without ever needing to cross paths with the ‘establishment’ to be subjected to it. Without ever leaving your council estate.

I had a clear ‘It’s mine, the choice, my voice’ moment and made it.

Perhaps the very act of not ‘falling in’ was enough to tip me comfortably.

Where are my principles here? I love the Queen. I just do. To deny that would be failing in the principle of honesty. I have been an ambassador for The Prince’s Trust for more years than I can remember. I am enthralled by Britain’s Royal History and have been since I was 8 in my favourite year of education and got to fashion Tudor Queen’s out of wine bottles, scraps of velvet and papier mâché and construct Tudor houses of our own design. It was brilliant.

I am lately comforted that we don’t have a popularist, divisive President for figurehead with a fortune yet to make in these strange regressive days. I wouldn’t certainly trust the outcome of that election right now.

Another nod to Remain, if you will.

If I read you rightly, the subtext might be that you disapprove? That’s a reasonable position. You’re not alone.

I feel no personal responsibility for the behaviours and crimes of our forefathers in terms of the appalling abuses they committed in the name of the Empire. There is no empire now. We all have grim histories and national shame and we all live in the age we are born to. My GG Father walked from Milnathort to London looking for work. My Gdad was a milk man and a North London Fireman in the Blitz. My mum was a War Child.

They’d have loved it. No one would have predicted it.

What does it change? I have not added MBE to my profiles, neither do I have it as a letter head. Primarily due to my not having a letter head. I wish to be transparent. But that’s beside the point. I don’t write letters.

You don’t get a bonus, a seat, a chart position or a club membership.

It comes with no personal benefit beyond the right, I believe, to hire St Paul’s chapel for a christening or a wedding. And my kids are humanists, so that’s like gifting a dunking doughnuts subscription to a diabetic.

I love a chapel, me, and church music. It’s just some of the dialogue that lets them down. My great-aunt was the eldest woman to be ordained at St Paul’s in the first ordination of women.

I find recovered footsteps highly romantic. Like finding my GGGF was a cider merchant in the building opposite the hospital my daughter was born in. Stuff like that.

I’d have always liked to smell the chapel.

Principles that I hold in favour with socialist agendas remain.

I was never against a rosette.

Not even when someone else got one.