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In honour of the life of the Queen I was forced to have a day off and lose revenue for my small business whilst my tax money was being spent on a massive and boring ceremony that I wasn’t too interested in, that went sarcastically slowly and involved some men with ridiculous feathers in their hats or rosettes on their shoes or very tall hats or red uniforms that made it easy for them to spotted by the enemy, but easy to hide the blood stains once they’d shot you.
I am happy to let it go though, as I know lots of other people got stuff out of it, but it was summed up neatly by my daughter who lost interest of this historical event pretty quickly and remarked “They should have made it a cartoon so kids could enjoy it.” To be fair some of the stuff wasn’t far off.
As grand and important an historical figure as Elizabeth was (and she will be remembered for millennia, possibly as the monarch who sat on the throne as the British Empire fell apart - though I suspect it will fall apart even more under the next monarch, whoever that turns out to [I don’t think they’ve even started the interview process yet]) to me, this all felt like a bit too much. Maybe if it hadn’t come at the end of a 10 day period of mourning and maybe if we weren’t all trapped in our houses, under threat of snipers if we stepped out of the door and maybe if it had just stopped after the church service. I am a UK citizen and I love and appreciate this country, but even though I should be used to our worse excesses, I watched some of this and wondered who the Hell we were.
Others, even some diehard Republicans (those who believe Bruce Willis should be Lord Protector) shed tears and were moved, but maybe I am a psychopath, but none of it did anything for me. It just felt a little bit too much for my tastes.
I wondered how people would react if the Queen leapt out of the coffin and said she’d Punk’d us all. Would they be annoyed at the trick and what she’d put us through or just happy she was still here. And how many times could she put us through that prank before the next funeral because a little bit less flamboyant.
I remembered in my own way and decided to stay off social media as my own tribute. Though it was important to let people know I was doing that or my sacrifice wouldn’t have meant much and people wouldn’t have known how respectful I was being. They might miss it all together. So obviously I had to tweet occasionally so everyone could marvel at my tribute to a great woman, from (given my sacrifice) someone who could only be described as a great man.
I mainly wondered about the first guy who’d stuck a feather in his hat and decided that was a good thing to do and the men who came later and put in bigger and bigger feathers, until we were at the point where the feathers were as big as they are now and wondered about what point in the future the Queen’s tomb would be opened, either by archaeologists of grave robbers or aliens. Which I suppose was at least thinking about the huge arch of time and how significance changes. Why did this human being deserve this reverence and this position in the first place? What would an independent observer make of all this? What would happen next to fuck up the self-employed? How come it’s OK for newspapers to come out today, but not comedy shows?
It was either this or the Emoji movie on Channel 5, which is perhaps a choice that sums up where the world is and why our doom was inevitable.
Some of the congregation seemed to sing God Save the Queen. Too late for that. Unless the beadle mentioned in the service was that Beadle. And he and Liz had been cooking this thing up for some good time.
Goodbye Elizabeth. Thanks for my Silver Jubilee crown.
The rest of you realise that you’re going to have to top all that for me though right?
