You are now two years and three months old: walking, talking ten to the dozen, toddling and meddling. It’s a wonderful age for children.
But you’re still far too young to comprehend the full meaning of life, and the passing of your country’s greatest queen, Elizabeth II.
You didn’t know it but you were born in the 68th year of her 70 years on the throne, the longest reign of any British monarch.
You arrived in Leeds during what became known as the Covid pandemic, when a lethal virus was spreading through the land. It killed tens of thousands of people, many of them old, like me. I survived, like your great-grandmother Lynne.
This dreadful scourge came at the end of a turbulent period in our nation’s history when the Queen was the one true pillar of stability.
She reigned through volatile times of partial civil war, dramatic social change and upheaval at work and in the home.
We now have a new sovereign, King Charles III, your monarch. His era will be known as the new Carolean Age.
I do not know what it will bring but I do know what I have lived through in the Elizabethan Age, which you will never know, alas.
Some things might seem trivial. Unless the most catastrophic fate intervenes, and generations of male heirs to the throne meet with a fatal accident, you will never see the Queen’s head on postage stamps (that’s if they still have them).
Nor will her noble visage appear on coins (if they still have those, too) or pound notes. You will never be taught at school to sing God Save the Queen, as we’ve sung these 70 years.
There will also be no more Queen’s Speeches to Parliament. It will be the King’s Speech, which for my generation was just a Hollywood film about her stammering father, George VI.
You will not see her Christmas address, when the nation puts down its knives and forks, and watches her calm, reassuring message to the nation on TV, serene and strong even in 1992, her “annus horribilis” which you can read about in royal memoirs.
You won’t read about what she wears, or her changing hemlines, or her stylish choice of handbags. Nobody cares what her successor wears, not even himself, or he wouldn’t affect that Scottish gallimaufry at the slightest opportunity.
All the pageantry, pain and pride that we have enjoyed and endured with our Queen will be history, to be read in books or watched on television history programmes.
The corgi dogs, her love of horses and horse-racing will become merely footnotes in the narrative.
You will never see those sparkling eyes for real, or that winning, half-shy smile that lit up wherever she was. That will be as much history to you as Queen Victoria is to me.
Lost in the past.
You’ll never get to be one of those fortunate children who greeted her with tiny Union flags when she went walkabout among her subjects, gathering bouquets of flowers from hot little hands.
There will be no letter from the Queen if you live to 100, though if you do, the Elizabeth Line across London may be fully operational by then.
No copies of the famous, and beautiful, mid-1950s portrait of Her Majesty by Italian artist Pietro Annigoni will grace government offices. You won’t see Her Majesty handing out Maundy money to a man and a woman for each year she has lived.
It will all be done by a man, as far into the future as we can see. You will live, at first – for how long, it’s impossible to say because he’s 73 (five years younger than me) – under the reign of our first king named Charles since the 17th century.
Charles I had his head cut off. Charles II was known as the Merrie Monarch because he liked a good time. A damn good time, even better.
He fathered at least 12 illegitimate children but no proper heir, so the throne went to his brother James, which caused a lot of bother with Scotland, where he was also king. Things are still not right up there.
Your Charles will not be on the throne as long as his mother because nobody lives to more than 140 years. Well, not at present. That might change, too.
Charles III will rule in his own way, wisely, we must hope. He has a clear grasp of the greatest threat to mankind, climate change, and he has served the longest apprenticeship for the job ever recorded.
He has met, and should have got the measure of, the key politicians, businessmen, church leaders, academics and workers’ representatives, during that training period.
He’s even had one-to-one tuition from a former Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron (you won’t remember him, he’s another footnote in history).
If you have the great good fortune, as I hope you will, to live to the great age at which our greatest Queen lived – 96 – you could live through many more kings. They tend to pop off more quickly than their mothers.
But none of them will ever be Our Elizabeth, the people’s Queen: the monarch who never failed us, the seemingly eternal mother and grandmother who sustained the national spirit.
I don’t want to make you feel robbed, or envious of what we had, and what you can never have, because it’s gone. That’s the way things are. You just have to live with it.
I felt I had to leave you with a great-grandfather’s memento of a time that was, and is now lost.
Not even God could save our Queen for ever, but our memories will last for as long as there are Britons to remember.
