Monday
Lest we get too comfortable in our attitudes of deference this week, let’s take a quick, corrective glance at Prince Andrew. There he was, out front at Balmoral at the weekend, trying to slide back into public favour and by Monday, apparently, succeeding.
I get it: even without royalty to reckon with, a heckler who shouts insults at someone as they walk behind their mother’s coffin is guilty of impertinence bordering on monstrous. Still, one wonders if there might be some middle ground between scraping the floor with our foreheads and acknowledging that, were the Duke of York to apply for a job at a high school, he probably wouldn’t clear the background check.
“Oh god,” says an Australian reporter friend after filing to her news desk in Sydney. “My lot have gone off the deep end because it looks like the heckler is Australian.”
I rewatch the clip of a man shouting at Prince Andrew from the Edinburgh crowd before being tackled by bystanders and dragged off by police. “Sounds Scottish to me,” I say.
“Yes, but look at his shirt.”
The next morning, the Sydney Morning Herald splashes Australia’s shame across the headlines: “Heckler wearing Melbourne City FC Shirt arrested after shouting ‘sick old man’ at Prince Andrew.”
A false alarm, it turns out. The 22-year-old in question was not Australian – perhaps he bought the shirt on his gap year – but either way, it is only the beginning of a week of pain for the world’s foreign correspondents. “Is Holyrood a palace, a castle or the Scottish parliament?” says my friend. “How’s a queen consort different from a queen?” A longsuffering sigh. “What the arsing hell is the privy council?”
Tuesday
An email comes in from a firm of west London solicitors I used in 2002, inviting me to share in their sorrow at the Queen’s passing. Barnes & Noble releases a statement. The casts of Les Misérables and Hamilton express regret at the death of the monarch and the quieter, more discreet death of irony.
Back in Australia, where it is AFL football season, the men’s game opens with the traditional Acknowledgment of Country – a land acknowledgment to Indigenous Australians – followed by a minute of silence for the Queen. Some players in the women’s game flat out refuse to engage in the silence.
For those covering the story in Britain, there are more pressing concerns: the fact that Harry and Meghan seem always to hold hands in public, while William and Kate never do. It’s hard to say how much this image has been massaged by picture editors, but all week, we see photos of the new Prince and Princess of Wales standing a wingspan apart, while the Sussexes lean cosily into each other.
One feels sorry for them all, and for anyone who, while reading news of the Queen, inadvertently stumbles on thoughts by a “body language expert” endeavouring to explain her grandchildren’s marriages.
Wednesday
Affection for the new king is at an all time high but if anyone can lose a crowd, I’d hazard Charles III can. His pen meltdown, reports that he won’t have to pay tax on his inheritance from the Queen, the video circulating of an old TV interview with Prince Harry in which he accuses his father of failing him as a child (“just because you suffered, that doesn’t mean your kids have to suffer”.) Prince William, telling a wellwisher at Sandringham that walking behind his grandmother’s coffin was hard because it took him back to his own mother’s funeral.
All serve as reminders that King Charles is still Prince Charles, a man we may feel we know relatively well.
Add to this cancelled doctors appointments and the decision by Center Parcs to close its premises on Monday – any news story in Britain containing the words “holidaymakers angry at” guarantees someone is done for – and it may be that the honeymoon is relatively short-lived.
Thursday
Good cheer arrives in surprising forms, be it the timing of a rainbow, the memory of a sandwich, or Theresa May, who gets more appealing with each passing Tory prime minister.
In the days immediately after the Queen’s death, the former leader had them in fits in the Commons with her anecdote about the Queen and a piece of cheese at Balmoral.
This week, she continued making public appearances and speaking about the Queen with such warmth and humanity, one wondered where this delightful version of May had been until now. For surprise transformations, it can really only be beaten by the time Michael Crawford turned from Frank Spencer into Phantom of the Opera.
Friday
Like everyone else, I’ve never seen anything like the queue forming this week to file past the Queen’s coffin – a queue that, were it to be stood on one end, would rise higher than Mount Everest (this may be untrue), or once joined, takes 279 days to get to the front (ditto).
It’s a queue to break one’s heart, full of vacuum flasks, cheerfulness, solidarity, snake-eyed vigilance against the threat of people pushing in and a woman who has held in a wee for a solid 48 hours – a feat to be immortalised, two years hence, in The Queue, a novel by Cormac McCarthy, and later an Oscar-winning film (dir Yorgos Lanthimos).
Countries less in favour of queues don’t understand the true nature of queueing; that one waits with no particular expectation of arrival. That it’s about place, not progress. That one respects and resents those further up the line and pities those behind, while taking comfort in their relative disadvantage. It may be absurd, but it demands an eccentric devotion simply because it is how things have always been done.
