Visiting What Isn't There.

The big Queen news today is the matter of the much-vaunted ‘lying in state’ (though in a closed coffin), first in Edinburgh and then in London from tomorrow. Apparently, thousands of people queued all night to file past the casket, and thousands more are expected in London over the next few days.

(This does rather suggest a scenario, doesn’t it? One of the filing-past mourners asks the attendant – I assume there must be some kind of attendant or guard of honour or something – a question:

“’Scuse me, mate.”

“What?”

“How do we know she’s in there?”

“I can assure you, she is.”

“Not proof though, is it? Couldn’t you open it up and let’s have a peek?”

“Move along please.”

But now I’m being flippant, so let’s move on.)

I once saw a TV drama in which a pathologist was taking a group of students through the process of conducting a post mortem (autopsy if you prefer.) The first thing the pathologist said was “You mustn’t think of this as a person. It’s just a body. The person has gone.”

It made sense to me then and it still does. Everything that made the physical manifestation a person is no more. It’s a human body, but not a human being. It’s now a mass of inert biological material beginning the natural process of decay. The person has gone, OK? In this case it certainly isn’t a Queen because you have to be alive to be one of those.

So why are people so keen to file past it, and even go without sleep in order to do so?

I suspect that most of them think it’s because they want to express their sense of mourning for someone who was important to them, even though they’d never met her, were never going to meet her, were certainly never going to visit her on an ad hoc basis to chat about the weather over morning coffee, and she isn’t actually there anyway.

And are they really in mourning? I expect those of a diehard royalist persuasion might be, but I further suspect that most are there for a slightly different reason: they want to be there in order to join with the masses in a kind of inverted celebration of what might be seen as a momentous event in history. It serves the need to belong.

And that’s why I wouldn’t bother.

(It also reminds of that favourite Far Side cartoon in which a man in full climbing gear is descending a hole in the ground. When asked why he’s doing it he replies: “Because it isn’t there.”)