“Why are people getting so upset about the death of someone they don’t know and have never met? What is wrong with people? They’re travelling from all over the world, in some instances, to queue to look at a coffin. This is not normal behaviour. The country is losing its mind” Truth be told, I’ve thought that way since the Queen died. Until now, I haven’t blogged about my feelings because I was, I suppose, trying to be kind. Silence, as the song goes, is golden. But I am blogging about it now because I have had what you might call an epiphany. Waking in the early hours, thinking hard when I wanted to sleep, it occurred to me that there have been numerous occasions when I have been upset about people I had never met and didn’t know.
The morning after 8th December 1980, I turned on my radio to hear the news that John Lennon had been murdered. It was 6.30am and every morning I tuned into BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. And when the news was read out, I sat up bolt upright, Any sleep in my eyes and in my brain quickly cleared. John Lennon was dead, an actual Beatle, and I remember my first thought was this: the band will never make any more music together. Slowly, I got my head together and realised that this was far more than just me missing out on new Beatles music. There would be devastated family and friends and even people like me would be shocked and upset.
Similar feelings hit me when Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys died in 1998 and Walter Becker of Steely Dan died in 2017. The effective end of two of my favourite bands. The death of the Labour leader John Smith in 1994, in the same week my paternal grandfather died, mangled my thoughts, too. I never knew John Smith but I knew that if he could achieve power, he would have been a great prime minister and improved the lives of millions. Then, he was taken from his family and from those who believed in him. I cannot explain why I felt like I did, but for a time there was great, almost unbearable sadness. So, while the death of Queen Elizabeth II didn’t hit me as hard as the death of John Lennon, it took me until the early hours of last night to put it all into context.
I hope that when the country returns to something more ‘normal’ in the weeks, months and years after the Queen’s funeral, we can draw on those feelings of love and compassion we have seen and experienced since she died. The hatred and bile of the red top newspapers and that of populist media hate-preachers has slipped away from the front pages and, with certain exceptions, on social media. People in the queues to see the Queen’s coffin have become friends for life with people they would never have otherwise met. In short, people have looked out for each other.
My view has always been that more people, far more people, are good than bad. That for every person who wants to do harm, there are countless more who wish to do good. Do-gooders are much maligned, yet isn’t that what we want people to be like?
For once, I have avoided politics in my blog. I know what I stand for and believe in and I am not sure it’s very different from how anyone else feels: security, prosperity, respect pretty well covers it all. If there is to be a legacy from the last week or so, the respect bit should be easy enough to maintain. I’m not convinced we want to carry on with the culture and class wars that have developed and worsened since the UK left Europe in 2016, led by liars, shysters, opportunists and and the pedlars of hate. I argue not to reopen the Brexit debate because for this generation, the argument is surely over. Instead, we need something we can unite around to build a kinder, gentler country. Because what I have seen across our nations has been exactly that.
If you’ve been deeply moved and even shed some tears at the passing of the Queen, I can now see why because I have looked inwards and in some similar way I’ve done much the same thing.
In life, the Queen was a unifying figure. Wouldn’t it be great if now she has passed her spirit could live on through all of us? And that being kind was forever, not just for the death of a Queen.
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