Long Live the Queen

On the Tube in London there are poems slated across the trains alongside adverts for indigestion meds and insurance. One that caught my eye thirty-five years ago, and I still have on my office wall, goes like this:

• I imagine the earth when I am no more:
• Nothing happens, no loss, it’s still a strange pageant...

I was drawn back to that line as I was sitting in a pub yesterday when they announced the Queen had died.

It was after six in the evening and a somber-looking BBC announcer came on the screen wearing a black tie and repeated the Buckingham Palace announcement. 

At that moment not much changed: The patrons kept talking, the bar men continued pulling pints, some grabbed their phones, no doubt at the buzzing the announcement caused.

Outside a garbage man continued collecting the trash, tourists asked for directions to the M&M store, and buskers in the middle of the Leicester Square continued their act.

I walked away from the noise of the square down Piccadilly and when I looked back this rainbow popped out as if to say, "Hey, look up from your phones...".

Late last night I headed to Buckingham Palace. As I left the hotel I heard singing coming from the kitchen. I peaked in a window through the swinging door where the cooks and staff were singing "God Save the Queen" at the top of their lungs.

On the way to the Palace the cabbie told me they were already beginning to print new money with King Charles' picture on it. He said when Elizabeth's father King George died they shut down theatres and other parts of daily life. The Queen made it clear she did not want another Bank Holiday.

"They wouldn't stand for that today," he said. 

At theatre earlier in the evening there was a two-minute moment of silence before the play began.

Operation London Bridge, the codename for the Queen's funeral plan, seemed to start quickly and quietly. They closed the Mall which leads to the Palace so I had to hoof it all the way down from Trafalgar Square, but I was joined by hundreds of people walking with beers, flowers, bottles of wine. It was past 11 and the pubs were closed but the people weren't done.

 

The media lined the lawn just outside the Palace in a long row of well-lit tents. They looked like invaders ready to storm the gates. But they spoke in muted tones about how almost everyone alive had only known one Monarch, how many Presidents she had met, her work ethic, how she'd welcomed the new Prime Minister just three days ago. 

 

The Palace looked empty, as it was, most of the inside lights were out, the flag was down.

Well after midnight another cabbie told me how his six-year old granddaughter had cried when she heard the Queen had died. 

”I knew why I was crying," he said, "but she didn’t. She’d just heard someone had died and knew it was sad.”

He continued: “It's not like a relative died, but it feels like a relative. You know what I mean?"

While Charles became King upon her death the country is not quite ready to move on. There will be 10 days of pomp and mourning, papers are sold out, a gun salute rang through the sky today, they postponed the weekend soccer matches, and many recognized that there will likely not be a Queen again in our lifetime with a string of men set to take the throne. So the British people will hold onto this Queen for a bit longer. Operation London Bridge is far from over.