We might be behind the times, so to speak, but K and I have been watching The Crown this week, and it seems there’s quite a bit of moping in that film. Most obviously, there’s Edward VIII, who gave up the crown in order to marry an American divorcee. The Duke of Windsor spends most of his screen time moping about this or that. He mopes about his allowance not being sufficient to entertain as he wishes. He mopes about how his family treats him — they’re all mad at him for the crisis he plunged the country into when he abdicated, but also they’re probably a little angry about him being a fairly open Nazi sympathizer who even went to German in ’37 and met Hitler. He mopes about how his wife won’t be allowed to come to the coronation of Elizabeth. He mopes about the pageantry of the coronation as he mocks with with his friends while watching it on television. And he seems to mope about not being king as well.

Yet in all that moping about, there are some problems of lesser, moral men that he doesn’t have to deal with. We don’t see him moping about his sibling drawing a mustache on him as he slept. The Girl has taken to “mustaching” him at night, and while he thought it was funny at first, he no longer does.

“I hate mustaches!” he declared this morning.

I do, too. They always make a man seem a little creepy to me, a little less trustworthy. I wonder if the Duke of Windsor ever wore a mustache — it might suit his personality. It certainly did Hitler’s.

He probably never moped about having to clean up his room after a play date. The man probably never cleaned up anything in his entire life.

To E’s credit, though, he didn’t mope today about having to clean up his mess.

“But I didn’t make it all!” he began, and I thought it was coming. The fuss. The mope. The crisis.

“Well, you should have asked your friends to help you clean up before they left.”

“I did. And they didn’t help.”

“I’m sorry.”

And that was about all there was to it. He cleaned up half the mess in the late afternoon and the other half just before bedtime, and he was calm the entire time. He might mope later in life about his allowance, but that’s still a ways off.

The Duke of Windsor also never had to mope about a repetitive task like opening seemingly endless bags of chess pieces and putting them into draw-string bags. Since I have waited for that moment for ages — getting chess sets for the chess club I sponsor at school, thanks to the generosity of the PTSA — I didn’t mope about it either.

I guess about the only thing I moped about today was all of the Duke of Windsor’s moping…

Inspired by the Daily Post’s prompt of the day: Mope.