Southampton - (Titanic Mess): "Worse than having to walk the bloody plank," the Queen moaned today ahead of Canard Line's Monday launch of MS Eponymous.
Still, the reported £5 million appearance fee may offload some of that royal ennui which said to be teetering on the verge of bankruptcy.
Palace PR sources later confirmed that naming the 92,000 ton fistula - er...vista! - class cruise ship was considered 'about as boring as dropping dead before an important public engagement' in royal protocol terms.
"No, not Prince William's engagement to that silly whotsis name," the Lord Chamberlain Lord Luce-Cannon explained quickly, "because that will never happen anyway.
"Simply put the Queen means she gets bored quite easily but never lets on about it being dead boring being HM in case the Loyal Subjects get bored with her first."
That boredom factor has been kept secret from the Canard Shipping Company whose name is synonymous with an 'unfounded or false, deliberately misleading fabrication, false report, bogus event, rumor, hoax or spoof' situation.
The Lusitania sank without trace in 1915.
