It’s Friday and today I post my weekly efforts, my scribbles about this and that, some topical, some simple observations or commentary about the life we live, the life we’ve had and the potential life to come. I don’t think there’s anything very intellectual about these posts but I hope that some part of them will encourage my readers to spend five minutes every week, pausing and being still.

This week’s post had been written, edited and proof-read and this afternoon I would have pressed the ‘send’ button. It was an update from Sami, my friend from The Hope Café, who’s gone to India to check out his family roots whilst awaiting the conclusion of the Post Office enquiry and subsequent allocation of compensation. Then yesterday late afternoon, news that our Queen had died pinged onto our news apps. Long gone are the days when the transmission of news relied on wind or horse power.

My step-father’s birthday was on June 1^st and he always reminded those who would listen that the date was known as ‘The Glorious First of June’. Why? Well in the C18th the West Indies were key to the strategic aims of France. In answer to appeals from the French planters, British forces occupied the ports of Haiti in1794, and soon held all the French islands except Guadeloupe.

A French convoy on its way to the West Indies was engaged by Admiral Howe 300 miles west of Brest and a quarter of its fighting strength was destroyed; his signal to the Admiralty started: ‘On this glorious first of June, …..’. The signal was entrusted to a midshipman on a fast frigate that made landfall at Plymouth and then conveyed over the 220 miles to The Admiralty in London by horseback; even with fresh horses maybe some days.

Today news is instant; sometimes it seems to be transmitted before it’s happened. This morning the press is replete with commentary about Queen Elizabeth II; professional journalists and social observers compete with personal outpourings on television, in the newspapers, on Facebook and on other social media sites.

A ex-client turned friend, Mark Gasson, posted this on Facebook this morning

Max Hastings, writing in today’s Times, summed up his column of reflections so: “She conferred a grace, charm, and stature on her reign that caught the imagination even of tens of millions of republicans. Our debt to her is beyond any power of payment, save by doing justice to her memory. We shall soon join in saying ‘Long Live The King’. But first we may allow ourselves precious moments to bid farewell and give thanks for Elizabeth II. For seven decades, God indeed saved the Queen.”

Gerald Baker, again from The Times: “It will rank as one of the larger ironies of the era of Elizabeth II that even as the English Queen reigned over a dominion of ever-diminishing significance, she became a figure of ever increasing global reverence. Immediate reaction of her death attested to her status as the best-known and probably most respected woman in the world. ‘I remember her as a friend of France’ says President Macron, ‘Her wisdom was truly unique’ says Micheál Martin the Irish Taoiseach, ‘An irreparable loss’ says President Zelensky, ‘Pained by her demise’ says Narendra Modi the Indian Prime Minister. 

There is a lovely story doing the rounds on various radio stations and social media which, although not verbatim, I recount here, as it sums up the way this human being lived her life. One summer The Queen was enjoying a picnic somewhere in the grounds of Balmoral, her 50,000 acre Scottish estate, when a couple of American tourists on a walking holiday saw her and her equerry Dick. They didn’t recognise the Queen but asked: “Where do you live?” “Oh! I live in London but I have a holiday home over that hill.” She said, pointing in the general direction of the huge stately home behind some woods. “How often to you get up here?” “Well” she said, “I have been coming here since I was a child so over 80 years.” “So you must have met the Queen of England?” “Well, I haven’t but Dick here has!” So they asked Dick what the Queen was like. “She can be very cantankerous at times but has a great sense of humour.” And before you could say boo to a goose, they had got either side of Dick, given the camera to the Queen and asked her to take a photograph. Then they swapped places so the Americans left with some photographs to show their family back in the States. As they left, the Queen smiled and said: “I’d love to be a fly on the wall when they show the photographs!”

I have been lucky enough to have met the Queen informally, to ‘have a chat’ and scribbled about that experience in ‘I had Dinner with Her Majesty’ in PC 289 of July this year, the month of her Platinum Jubilee. Those in the last few days of their life often have a sense of quickening events. One of our Prime Ministers, Harold MacMillan, is reported to have had his normal evening whisky, put the glass on the table and murmured: “I think that’s enough” … and died. Knowing the late Queen’s impish sense of humour, I wonder whether she had simply waited to say goodbye to Boris, welcomed the new Prime Minister, Liz Truss and then, duty done, decided it was time to go?

In 2016 Celina’s father died. I had only known him for four years but come to love him deeply. In PC 60, ‘Goodbye … but never forgotten’ I summed up my thoughts about him. “The man I grieve in this piece was an enormously loved, talented individual who used his intellect to further our understanding of our brains and how they function. He was a simple man of faith or maybe a man of simple, deeply held faith, and if anyone was prepared for what might follow this earthy life, he was.”

I sense this last sentence could apply equally well to Elizabeth II (with some pronoun adjustments!).

Richard 9^th September 2022

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