Burger Queen by Will Self

The other afternoon I was cycling up the Mall when the Queen emerged from the gates of Buckingham Palace, so plumply erect in her customised Daimler that she resembled nothing so much as a cerise pouffe propped up in an old-fashioned Silver Cross perambulator. There was only a smattering of tourists about, but even so, they spontaneously formed a guard of honour and laid on a scattering of applause. […] For Burger King is to McDonald’s as the monarchy is to republicanism; it’s as hard to imagine Betsy 2 noshing on a Big Mac as it is Georges Danton chomping on a Whopper. McDonald’s is the Federation – Burger King is the Klingon Empire; McDonald’s is a postmodern conspiracy to replace the noble and just with hydrolysed corn syrup and styrofoam, while Burger King has the ivied sanctity of a millennium-old Cistercian monastery.