I don’t believe it, you know. There was very little evidence of such high emotional commitment to the Queen when she was alive, and my revised view is that it’s all about releasing a pressure valve. People have been under a level of stress unfamiliar to most of them over the past few years, what with Covid, Ukraine, climate change and the cost of living crisis, and the death of the Queen has simply been the trigger to externalise it.
But what would I know? I wouldn’t, would I, so maybe it’s time I shut up. (Although I must just mention: ‘We re-enacted our marriage vows in honour of Her Majesty.’ That one is so patently absurd as to be amusing at least.)
(What’s bothering me much more at the moment is something I discovered recently, and was reminded of again by an ad which has persistently soiled my inbox all day. Marcus Mumford of Mumford and Son (though now solo apparently) is married to Cary Mulligan. That’s upsetting, because what chance is there now that Cary, bless her Lady B eyes, will learn of me, want to meet me, and then beg to be the light of my firmament for the rest of what time I have left? Even less than there was before, I’d say.)
But back to royalty for a moment. I could have met Princess Anne once, you know. I say ‘met’, but you don’t actually meet royal personages. What happens is that you stand dutifully in a line (whether you want to go to the bathroom or not) until she comes level with you. You bow, she offers the weakest of handshakes and asks ‘and what do you do?’ to which you reply ‘not a lot’, and then she does the dismissive version of the royal smile before moving onto the next victim. It was at the theatre where I worked once. I declined to go in that day because, I said, I don’t do bows. It made me briefly unpopular but we got over it.
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