Be kind

My favourite TV sketch involving the Queen will always be the one from the 2012 Olympics when her majesty, and her corgis, performed with James Bond. Despite my many reservations about the existence of the royal family, which remain to this day, I learned long ago that the love felt for her by the Great British Public was like no other for someone most people had never met. And I felt that too, knowing the soft leadership she gave the country, usually in its hour of need. Not that long before she died, the Queen performed another great sketch with the great Paddington Bear. That chimed with me, not just because I’ve always had a soft spot for Paddington and not just because he was undeniably cute. Although his background was fictional, it still mirrors real life.

Michael Bond, who created Paddington, saw a teddy bear on a shelf in a shop near Paddington station on Christmas Eve 1956. He bought it for his wife. The bear reminded Bond of Jewish refugee children arriving in London in the war or London children being evacuated to the country. They bore labels which inspired the one on Paddington: ‘Please look after this bear’.  And the background Bond gave the bear was that of one from ‘Darkest Peru’, orphaned after an earthquake and brought up by his Aunt Lucy; a stowaway, a migrant, perhaps in modern parlance a refugee, an asylum seeker. The public reaction to the Queen having tea with Paddington was, for me, strangely moving and illustrative of our country on a good day, an increasing rarity in these unstable times.

I cannot know for sure whether the Queen knew of Paddington’s background, but it doesn’t matter. Her reaction to him was enough for a tear to well up in this old cynic’s eye because this was our Queen, a constant in all our lives, who somehow conveyed a message that things would be all right in the end, engaging with an albeit fictional bear who was literally an illegal immigrant. To enjoy the sketch, it is necessary to set to one side reality and imagine Paddington was real. Who would not want him to be? And the sketch reminded me how important it is to be kind. The Queen got that pretty well every time.

This unique double act once again reminded us that we should try to be kind. That was the essence of the sketch, something we have all but forgotten on this septic isle. Let that be one of her great legacies. She papered over the cracks of a declining country, looking back at former glories, or worse still imagined former glories, instead of looking forward. It is hard to imagine any other royal doing what she did, never mind for as long as she did. We will all miss her.