Awful news to hear that the Queen has contracted Covid-19. 95 is not the ideal age to catch a virus that has so far killed in excess of 180,000 people in Britain, especially when the over 90s have fared worse than most. The Palace is reporting that the old girl has mild cold symptoms and will be confined to ‘light duties’ in the coming days, perhaps a little dusting or some hoovering. She’s in a good place, though, at Windsor and is unlikely to suffer the fate of people who were sent from hospitals to care homes to die in early 2020. The very last thing this country needs in these dark times is to lose our gracious Queen.
Yes, you did hear me right. For all the criticism of the royal family – and boy is so much of it well-deserved? – the Queen stands apart from the rest. It’s true that in the grand scheme of things, she doesn’t actually do anything that affects law-making or international issues, for example, but her one big trait is that she offers stability. Indeed, many people, even those who have never met her (which is almost everyone), literally love her, or maybe think they love her, like they thought they loved Princess Diana when she died back in 1997. Whilst I don’t actually love her in any way, I respect her. Whilst I find the royal family an absolute nonsense in the modern age she is always there with a knowing smile and, usually, the right words for a crisis. Who could forget her deeply moving ‘We will meet again’ address during the dark days of the Covid pandemic? That many of us won’t meet again is neither here nor there. It was the thought and indeed the hope that counted.
I suspect the House of Windsor may crumble, if not fall, when she finally meets her maker. We put up with many of the royal shenanigans because we think so much of the Queen and so little of some of the others like Prince Andrew – who, lest we forget, remains a nuclear strike away from being king: don’t do it Vlad – and the man who would be King, although hardly anyone wants it, Charles.
If the Queen gets Covid like I did – and believe it or not she is a few years older than me – it will be nothing worse than a new and continuous cough, some royal snot, a loss of taste (insert your own joke), ongoing minor breathing issues and feeling knackered. Hopefully, within a few days she will being driven from town to town asking, “And what do you do?” and being lied to every week by Alex ‘You Can Call Me Boris’ Johnson. We will celebrate the next jubilee in June by getting shit-faced and watch her Christmas speech after a guts full of Turkey and Pudding. And that’s the point. Queen Elizabeth is always there. Even though she isn’t there to do much, that’s the stability we talk about. In a world where nothing stays the same, where we are lied to day in day out by Boris Johnson’s lying government, where we are on the brink of war with Russia (or are we?), where Prince Andrew pays a woman he has apparently never met a mere £12 million to shut her up…oh wait, that’s her son. But you get my drift.
In some ways, the Queen’s family is a bit like Britain itself. Dysfunctional, all on state benefits and fucked up. Four kids, three of whom are divorced, one a jug-eared adulterer, another a friend of a convicted paedophile and sex trafficker. Who can honestly say they don’t know a family like that? But the Queen? No scandal, no nay never.
On Remembrance Day, she represents me, not Johnson with his ill-fitting suit and toddler haircut. She lived through World War Two and married an actual war hero. That will do for me.
I have no way of knowing, but she seems to be a good person to me. Some say the very best of us. And at 95, she still seeks to serve her country. I hope she makes a swift return to rude health and continues to shine some light in these dark times. When she dies, I want a root and branch review of the royal family and plan a future where the royals actually work for a living like the people they rule. But that’s for another day.
God can’t save the Queen because he isn’t there, but a fascist regime? Maybe Elizabeth II is all we have to stop that.
1 comment
5
Comments are closed.