God Bless Our Gracious Queen

 On Thursday the 8th of September, 2022, Queen Elizabeth II died at Balmoral, aged 96, just a day or so after meeting outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his successor Liz Truss. 

You wouldn't want your own nonagenarian grandma to meet either of them, would you?

I'm sure it won't surprise you to learn that I'm not a monarchist. I think most of the Royal Family are a waste of space and money, and ought to get proper jobs. However, I've always had a sneaking admiration for the queen herself. Being born into wealth and privilege is just as much an accident of birth as being born into poverty and destitution, and neither makes you automatically deserving or undeserving. It's not as if you get a choice in the matter, is it? And there are vanishingly few people who would willingly relinquish their fortunes for the good of mankind.

So, yes, the queen was an immensely privileged woman. She had the best of medical care, the best food, servants and carers and helpers, multiple properties with a full staff to run them, as much foreign travel as she desired with the most convenient and luxurious methods of transport; she had horses, dogs, hairdressers, specially-designed clothes. She also married a handsome, dashing young man and had four healthy children. Her life was, in many ways, blessed in a way that 'ordinary people' can barely imagine.

However, she had her share of personal tragedies too. Her beloved father died young, and in a life of almost a century she lost many others close to her. Even rich people feel grief, despite what many poor people seem to think! She experienced the soap opera that has been her children's adult lives, including the whole 'Diana Debacle' and the discovery that her second son is probably a sexual predator with questionable friends. 

But more than anything else, she has existed within the confines of a system of protocol and tradition, of inflexible expectations, of ritual and duty that the rest of us can't really imagine. Queen Elizabeth always seemed to me to take her Royal duties very seriously. Whatever you think of the Royal Family, Elizabeth was always hard-working, highly-conscientious, and believed in fulfilling her role in the best way she could. When I think of her, words like 'tireless' and 'devoted' spring to mind. She had no real material power to change anything substantial, but she was nevertheless expected to be our ambassador, a diplomatic host for foreign dignitaries whether she liked them or not, always our charming and dignified representative. She wasn't able to express her true opinions on anything. We all recognised her, seeing her face on bank notes, coins and stamps all our lives, watching her wave from carriages and on walkabouts, wearing those distinctive pastel-coloured outfits that many found funny, unflattering or outdated, but which seemed apt - slightly out of touch, slightly off-kilter, as befits a woman who lived such a strange and off-kilter life.

She travelled the world. She met famous people. She rode her horses and walked her dogs and played Christmas games at Balmoral with her family. She watched TV. She interacted with fourteen different Prime Ministers of Great Britain, starting with Winston Churchill and ending, in an example of wincing bathos, with Liz Truss. She was by all accounts a bit of a philistine, a woman of action rather than intellectualism, a woman who had a sense of humour despite her sometimes dour outward appearance. 

I could not have done her job. I don't care how many huge mansions and foreign holidays I was given, I could not have spent so much of my time waving and smiling, small-talking strangers, attending tedious formal dinners and nonsensical rituals, remembering I was always on public display and so were the rest of my closest family. And not being able to retire! I don't have it in me to devote my existence to this type of life. But Queen Elizabeth believed in 'Public Service' and that this was what she had dedicated her life to, when taking on the role of queen. She might have been deluded in this. Her religious faith and her upbringing might have led her to a false idea of what being a monarch was about. But we must surely admire her dedication, her quiet conscientiousness, her hard work.

There are of course much worse ways to live than the life lived by our deceased queen, but let's be honest - in this country, most of us don't live in those ways. Most of us aren't starving or freezing or homeless (not yet, anyway), and we can choose what we want to do, most of the time, within reason. We can slob around in our night-clothes all day if we want, when we're not at work - we can be rude to the neighbours if we're feeling pre-menstrual - we can get drunk and snog a strippagram without fear of it being splashed over the front page of the papers next day. We don't have to spend hours in the company of people we don't like, being nice to them, except occasionally (at Christmas, for instance!). We don't have to live in ridiculously large, draughty houses or wear clothes chosen for us by other people. And we don't have to work until the day we die. 

I was much more upset by the death of Queen Elizabeth than I expected to be. It is the end of an era. Her demise, though expected, has saddened even a staunch republican like myself, and I'm not afraid to admit it. She was tough, competent, determined and devoted to what she saw as her duty, and those qualities are not often seen these days.