The Sophist 16: In which there shall be no talk of That Thing

And then you wake up and it’s colder. You find a vest, tights, a thick dress, boots, a proper coat, feeling rather accomplished as you insulate yourself against the day. As if the day now can’t quite touch you. Only, you then find yourself traversing London and sweating on the Tube, and peeling off layers, because on the Tube it is always that sweaty, sickly, subterranean summer, and now it’s got itself all over you. As if someone misunderstood the story of how Persephone was condemned to spend half the year in the underworld, creating Winter, and so they ramped up the temperature in the underworld too.

I had so many things to say about the Royal funeral, so many many things, but what a joy it is to wake up this morning and realise that you don’t have to say any of them. Today is a blank slate of autumnal possibility. The Jewish new year is coming. New things are on their way! 

(Ok just after I say this one thing - just this one small thing - which is that, if you had seen my face when my boyfriend insisted that no, they were not all queuing for 12 hours through the night to see the queen’s body lying there in an open casket, for gods sake no, they haven’t embalmed her, you can’t actually see her face. ) 

(You mean - they’re queuing to see the box?) 

(And so we move on. No speculation about what will happen to a country whose popular monarch has gone and whose new one is already an old one, already tired, already frustrated - I’m stopping. I have stopped!)  

(No, there will be no explanations to my foreign friends of how one in ten British people say they had met the Queen, and honestly I’m surprised it’s that few because she spent 70 years in the full-time job of meeting people, that was the whole point, and nearly any family who has been resident in this country for decades will have had some encounter with the Royal Family, which is how the Royals do it, how they maintain the fine balance of appearing unfathomably distant (pageantry, swords, blood feuds, inbreeding, horses etc) and yet tantalisingly close (shaking our hands and asking us how far we have come today, so down to earth, they’re just like us!) How they keep us in the sexy Venn diagram of revering/fearing/liking them. How they get us to coo over their baby photos while endlessly wondering what they must actually be like.)

(While I am definitely not here to write about the Royals today I will say, for example, that in my family alone, my paternal grandparents went to Buckingham Palace for a garden party. Which many, many people have done.  Which is how they keep this pact with the public going, how they keep us believing in them, like Father Christmas made flesh. You too, like Charlie Bucket, in your humble shack, could get an invite to the place! Although I don’t know if everyone else gets accidentally drunk when they met the Queen. I think my dad’s parents had been invited because of my grandfather’s achievements as a headmaster of a state grammar school, public service type stuff, and they were teetotallers who thought the green ginger wine they were offered was like ginger beer, ie non-alcoholic, which it was not, and obviously they had absolutely no tolerance to even a small glass or four at all. So my dad, a young man with his first car of his own who had offered to pick them up afterwards, was quite surprised to drive up to the Palace and welcome these giddy Christians into his vehicle, noticing they seemed markedly happier than at most other moments of their lives. )

(Also, as we’re on the topic, when my brother was at university, the Queen came to open a new library in his college and he took a photo. This was before the days of camera phones and social media, so I saw it only weeks or maybe months later, after it was printed out. She had a pink skirt suit, pink handbag and pink lipstick, not just on her lips but on her teeth. Lipstick on her teeth! Now this sort of fuck-up is surely an extended part of the PR campaign and how they pull the slightly more niche demographic of people like me, who don’t respond to their baby photos, in. Perhaps. ) 

(Also there was this one long late East London night, after an Elton John party - which I went to because I used to be a music journalist, I am not friends with Elton John - when I befriended one of the queen’s nine butlers. As I said it really was a very long night, and my main memory is of him saying that the thing you have to understand about the royals is all the alcohol. Anything that you think about involving the queen and her family - you now had to re-imagine it with the background of them being low-level shitfaced at all times.) 

(Then there is the time I met Prince Andrew when I was a little girl but just writing those words looks so bad that - well I’ve written about this on here before.) 

Anyway, back to life in a country where you get told off for asking too many questions, told off for being rude, told off for asking WHY we have to stay in the faux middle ages to create our political soft power, why we can’t think up something new and get this dead weight of imperial history off our guilty backs - but anyway, like I said, it’s autumn, it’s a new start, let’s fill it with things that are beautiful, let’s find a thin plume of holy silver smoke to hold onto, to get us through these days. 

Let’s find beauty, on our cancer wards, in our crumpled families, in our lonely days. There is a silver plume of smoke in everything and it is shining. It is whispering to you. 

Not sure what I was actually going to write about now. Well it might come back to me.