Much ado about nothing...

Instead of watching the funeral, I’d planned to go to Blacktoft Sands: to share a convivial hour or two with other bird-watching republicans. But the day was overcast and, well, once I’d checked out the BBC website, it was easier just to carry on watching (though I fell asleep for half an hour during the funeral service in Westminster Abbey, and missed Justin Welby telling his captive audience, during the sermon, that “We will all face the merciful judgement of God”).

Here we are, in straitened times, reeling from the covid pandemic and with a difficult winter yet to come. There will be other old ladies dying this winter, because they can’t afford to turn the heating on. Yet nobody looked at the plans for the funeral - decades in the planning, I imagine - and wondered if it might be a good idea to scale the event down a bit. So we got the full monty, with the pomp and pageantry cranked up to 11… and then some.

The proceedings must have cost a fortune (and all from the public purse); they were certainly labour intensive. The Queen's coffin was accompanied by the bearer party of the Grenadier Guards, the King's Body Guards of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen at Arms, the Yeomen of the Guard and the Royal Company of Archers, with their pikes and swords, halberds and bows, epaulettes and aiguillettes, bearskins, ruffs, bonnets, croziers, chasubles, orbs, sceptres, mitres and cockades. When they’re not following the royal casket, with their heads bowed, what do these people do all day?

The performance was certainly impressive, if you like that sort of thing. I looked in vain for a wink of an eye or the raising of an eyebrow: any acknowledgement, by someone, somewhere, that this carefully choreographed cosplay, this precision-tooled royal pantomine, was just a ridiculous joke…