Very sad to hear of the passing of Queen Elizabeth on Thursday. Sad, but not entirely unexpected, as the reports coming from Balmoral were increasingly gloomy.
I found it affected me much as when I realised that the last of the family generation before me had died and thus I was now the front-line. In this case, it is the realisation that it really is the end of an era - and an era that had lasted most of my lifetime.
Whilst Charles has made a good start to his reign, I do worry that the republicans in the commonwealth countries (let alone the United Kingdom) will seize the opportunity to change their constitutions. While the Queen was in place, it was a difficult change for them to get started, but in this interregnum, and particularly until Charles proves himself, I feel the whole commonwealth edifice will be unstable.
Why that should bother me at my age, I have no real idea, except that I am actually a child of Empire!
The television if full of stories by people who met the Queen and G and I realised that neither of us had ever even seen her in the flesh (and I am not sure any of our family members did either) . The closest I got was when she visited Manchester in about 1955 and was due to be driven back to the airport and passing near our primary school. We were provided with little flags on stick and wheeled out to line the road on the corner (actually almost opposite our house). After a long wait, a couple of large dark cars went past (and I don´t remember any great cavalcade of police as now). No occupant visible, no wave noticed, but we waved our flags wildly and pretended we had seen her to our parents.
G reckons she saw her in a car as she passed the Halle booking office where she (G not the Queen) was working. G also managed to be the sole person to see Price Edward when he visited the Shell offices in Brunei, as she went to the office entrance to see him emerge and found herself totally alone when he did so. Apparently the school had set up something for the parents to see him in another location and notified them via a note to their children - obviously forgetting that there were other (royalist) Brits who worked for them.
And that is it for even seeing members of the royal family in the flesh. Strange how they can be so much a part of your life just through reports and film and photographs and without any sort of personal interraction.
In relation to the mourning period in the UK, it is obviously a requirement due to the ceremonies that have to be invoked and the places her coffin has to be seen in or rest in. The state funeral is not until Monday the 19th - which means a prolonged period of waiting. I know we will actually watch the funeral, as that sort of thing is probably Britain at its best for ageing expats like me (and fervent royal watchers like G).
Although, and for now, the cry of "Long Live the King!" still sounds quite surreal to us Elizabethans.
* and now it is the day after the funeral - and what a funeral it was.
For some unknown reason, I felt compelled to watch the whole day unfold on the tv, as if I owed it to the Queen. Phenomenal pomp and ceremony - and all conducted without a hitch. Guardsmen / pall bearers were superb and I think everyone was wishing them well as they manoeuvered up and down steps and around obstacles. I found the final Windsor church service the most moving as we finally saw the end of the second Elizabethan age.
In fact, from the whole 10 days since the Queen died, the thing I found most moving was the queue to see the lying in state. The way people waited patiently for so many hours just to see the coffin and bow to it was truly amazing - and does give you some hope for Britain in the future - although I would love to see the demographics for the queue to see it it was a fair representation of the country as a whole (as it certainly wasn´t the sort of "modern family-style" Britain that is shown in most tv adverts). I like him anyway, but I was very impressed with Beckham just joining in the general queue (and. like many, saying it was for his grandfather´s memory in particular).
My one real gripe wa that I felt that the move from Scotland to London was poorly handled. If ever you wanted "levelling up" it should have been in the hearse driving through Newcastle, York, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Stoke, and Birmingham etc., over a period of a couple of days and nights (note how I slipped in an "Oxford comma" for fun during the latest UK teacup-storm re punctuation ?) rather than making it all so "London-centric". Oh, and while I am on the subject, I think there could have been much better thinking about queue management (but generals always fight the previous war they say).
I have reinforced to G that I don´t want anything quite so lavish and that a no-one-present cremation with my ashes tossed anywhere they choose is a better option. In-extremis, put the ashes under a tree on the mountainside, with a large measure of JWB to wash me down. I guess it takes all sorts....
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