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God save the Queen — 13 Comments

  1. I hope you would do the same when President Huggins dies or will you just an old curmudgeon about that too. I’m in England at the moment and the reaction here has surprised me. It says a great deal about the power that a monarchy can have to unify and inspire a country. Like the war has done in Ukraine.

    • I actually have great respect for the woman. She was dumped into a job she didn’t want and she stuck with it for 70 years. That alone is an achievement but she did the job well. Her main problem was her errant family. Having watched “The Crown” which seems to be a pretty accurate account of her life, I don’t know how she put up with them.

      I have buried a few presidents in my time [in particular De Valera] and there was the usual ceremonial pomp but nothing compared to the shutting down of an entire country.

      • As I understand it, a lot of people hated De Valera which made things different. That’s the problem with a political head of state The country here will shut for Monday morning because that is what the people want by and large. I’ve lived Ireland for 50 years and Irish reactions still sometimes baffle me. Just accept that the Irish are sometimes in the same position about Britain

  2. Think of it more as a monumental free commercial for Britain’s ceremonial services. The country’s damned near bankrupt, so needs to drum up foreign trade wherever it can. That tricky when the country doesn’t actually make anything now, so it has to be the services sector – and what better example of what Britain does best than ‘ceremonials’, nobody can hold a gilded candle to them.
    If a country ever needs an assassination doing, they sub-contract it to Mossad, best in the business. So if they need a state occasion, some aggrandising event for their pompous but corrupt leader, why not sub-contract it to the Brits – best in the business – as proved by their globally broadcast ability to get half a million folk to queue all night in the cold, just to walk past an empty box covered with a bling cloth. That’s a business proposition that most tin-pot dictators will mortgage their people’s future to have staged. ‘Ceremonies R Us’, or ‘Ceremonies R UK’, I can see the cash-flow forecast already. . . .

    • They reckon [optimistically?] that it will be the most watched event ever so I suppose it’s cheaper than buying advertising space? They say the viewing figures will be in the billions?

  3. Same thing in Toronto. It’s absolutely out of control…even bigger than Sept. 11. There’s no news being reported on TV, radio or newspapers. Various news commentators have gone to London to address the grief Canadians are feeling by sending ‘comforting’ news updates. There are no updates because it happened last week and it’s over. I don’t know anyone who needs comforting.
    Sue, Toronto

    • Herself has the television on at the moment in the other room. We had a full news programme dedicated to the Queen, followed by Songs of Praise [singing all the hymns the Queen liked]. I don’t know what’s on next but I’m pretty sure in will involve the Queen somehow.

  4. Don’t worry – although it’s wall to wall on all the meeja right now we’ll be back to wall to wall Climate Emergency or Ukraine (or whatever “latest thing”) in just a few days…

    • My timing was brilliant when I signed up for Netflix. It has been a life-saver over the last week. Mind you, they have a staggering quantity of stuff devoted to something royal.

  5. Funerals here in the wilder west tend to be a community affair. Everyone along the route of a funeral cortege turns out, Whether you really know the family of the deceased not. Not quite the same as queueing to see a draped box in Westminster Hall, but the same sentiment is driving it. A need to feel part of a greater something.

    Maybe these things don’t happen the same way in the East of the country.

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