Waking up

 

Subject: Waking up

My bedside radio sprang into life this morning with the sound of the Queens voice. I was jolted into life by the reality that she was no longer here and that the routines she slavishly carried out, ‘what she would deem her duty’ we’re no longer hers to do. They have passed to Charles her eldest son to make of them what he can.

It’s a rather chilling thought that after death things carry on as if we hadn’t been here and it’s particularly scary that all the effort we attended to any task we thought important is now being done just as competently by another. We have the notion that we are indispensable, even important when actually we are not, we act a part, often construed in our own head, praised and promoted by ourselves, paraded as our own competency when in fact we only play a two bit part in some mystical play written by an evolutionary author.

Somewhere she lays at peace now, no red boxes to open disgorging the dull routine ramblings of other people who also think they are important. All this ‘importance’ which, one day will be taken over by Artificial Intelligence leaving us free to consider other things. That duty the Queen so reflected and often missing in our own dealings, is highly praised but in a robotic world soon becomes superfluous as will much of our classical evaluation of worth. You see it now with modern standards of communication dragged by the expletive to the building site, used these days almost as a punctuation mark. I often smile when the announcers on the media apologise because an expletive was heard in the background as if the word used was not common in the playground.

It’s a world so changed at the personal level. From abortion to seatbelts but not equality. From racial awareness to a lack of awareness when it comes to our ain folk. From greed to the assumption that without it you are somehow stunted. A world without rules or compassion, of individuality and to hell with society. It’s a world so mangled up by individual pressures and assumptions which somehow turn into rights.

The longevity of the queens life saw all this change as she sailed on mostly unaffected, separated by tradition and household status, only in her own family was she exposed, to mishaps which befall us all. The odd arrangements which would have been almost impossible when she was young. Those pangs of remorse when baffled that someone very close rejects our concerns and of course the death of a companion who had shared breakfast and tea for all those years is now an empty plate.

I’m sure in Balmoral this morning the gyroscope around which all spun, now no longer a force has to find new fastenings. There’s an empty space at the table until the King is crowned and he has such large shoes to fill that it’s doubtful he will. Poor old Charles with his infidelity which marked his card with the people, to the slightly weird relationship with plants and his less weird relationship and concern for the planet.  His time spent waiting off in the wings made him look slightly ridiculous his  hand stuck in the pocket of his jacket, definitely old school, but generally with a benign homely look on his face, something his mother never quite learnt to manage.

Please pass the kippers ma’am but the responsibility has moved on.