This is a fairly short entry, because I don’t suppose I really need to write about what I have been doing today. I am quite sure that all of my readers have been doing exactly the same.
You will not need me to tell you about it.
I expect most of you were considerably better organised than we were as well, and managed not to have to leap up halfway to Windsor to make a belated and urgent breakfast of bread and honey and more cups of tea. I wasn’t hungry when it started, but by the time she got to the Cromwell Road we were so desperately ravenous that we went belting into the kitchen to try and arrange something hasty and non-intrusive.
We didn’t have any marmalade or I would have used that, in a gesture of respect.
Of course it was absolutely brilliant, I bet the Americans are jolly sick that they got all uppity and chucked themselves out of the Empire and so couldn’t be in the procession. We had a morning of trying to identify regiments, reasonably unsuccessfully, and picking out persons of interest. The lady in charge of the Royal Navy chaps pulling the gun carriage was an Old Gordonstonian, and we admired the slouch-hatted Australians and the Canadian Mounties very much. Some of the horses further back looked as though they were starting to get a bit bored with the whole event, and Prince George looked a bit the same. How very odd to think that in about ninety years the world will be doing the same for him.
All in all it was magnificent, and I imagine the whole world wished it was British this afternoon, or at the very least allowed to be in the Commonwealth. I hope the Commonwealth sticks together now, it is a lot more interesting than Europe. I think I am a Commonwealthian in my soul. Europe can do its own thing without us.
We watched for the entire day, crying a bit at intervals, like the heartbreaking moment at the Cenotaph when all the flags were lowered, and pretty much every time those heroic coffin-carriers picked her up again, until finally she had sunk beneath the floor of the chapel, and the tedious commentator-whittering started. After that we took the dogs out and brought the washing in.
Windermere was deserted, like the Apocalypse or Christmas Day. There was a hushed silence everywhere, and in the end we didn’t go to work. We felt quiet and not at all like sitting on the taxi rank, so we had some pasta for dinner and finally made our way to bed.
I am there now.
It is going to be a New Beginning. We have all said Goodbye to being Elizabethans, and we are now, I imagine, Carolinians. It is a New Age. I think it might be splendid. King Charles is a decent chap.
There was a spider in the flowers, which made me feel better about the ones in the corners of our ceiling. They get everywhere.
I am going to sleep.
