The Queen is dead. I have absolutely no feelings about her passing although I empathise with the family who have lost a mother and grandmother. She was a familiar figure throughout my life but I never met nor wished to meet her. I had hoped that the death of the monarch would pass without the shrieking histrionics of Diana’s death or the manufactured outrage over Peter Sisson’s tie colour after the Queen Mother shuffled off the mortal coil. The whole ‘service and dedication’ mood of the early reports on Thursday seemed to indicate a more restrained coverage of the event.
In the space of a few days, however, the media and sections of the public have ramped up their initial tempered approach to absolute batshittery levels of crazy. I appreciate that filling rolling news reporting with interesting and informative news and opinion is incredibly difficult, especially as little actually happens in the intervening hours and days after the death and before the funeral. There are the set piece formal events of course but constant rehashing of a life and pursuit of new and inconsequential stories to tell is tiresome, especially since we apparently have a new Prime Minister at home while abroad Pakistan is under water and Ukraine seems to be making important gains in the war with Russia.
Now ‘respect’ is the watch word and ‘time and place (not the)’ the chastisement, or even arrest, to any who disagree with the whole palaver. Conformity to the state mandated mourning is expected to such an extent that apparently all other funerals scheduled for Monday 19th September have been cancelled, as have cancer operations, food banks will be closed and even Centre Parks tried to evict holiday makers from their sites for the day, a decision since reversed.
A woman in London is said to have taken the urn containing the ashes of her late mother to Buckingham Palace because ‘she ( the deceased mother) loved the Queen’ while another woman in Edinburgh was, like a hamster on some bizarre wheel, circling continuously in the queue to see the coffin in St Giles Cathedral, returning seven times to view it. Meanwhile piles of flowers and (good grief!) marmalade sandwiches are rotting on the streets.
When I was a small child I buried a doll in the back yard. I was overheard preaching over the grave, ‘To the Father, Son and in the hole she goes.’ I knew this was the proper way to conduct a funeral service then and I heartily recommend it as a speedy end to the current farce that has overtaken this country.
Significantly Different 