The Queen is Undead

  Queen Ahmose-Nefertari, not looking a day over 3,500

I remember only too well the hysteria after Princess Diana died.

The rank corruption of people who had mocked or despised her, suddenly turned onto its head... The mobs of angry little Englanders demanding not only that the Queen publicly mourn, but on their terms... The disgusting spectacle of making two teenage boys march solemnly behind their mother's coffin, just to sate those utter morons... 

And then there was that deep fear that if you were to say or do 'the wrong thing' your career, and even your well-being, could be in danger.

It was the moment I finally decided to hate being British. All that passive aggression, low-minded sense of self-pity and puffed-chest boorishness. The lack of real individuality. The fact that the only options in life were red tories or blue tories, or whatever Rupert Murdoch wanted. That horrible sense of a lynch mob champing at the bit, as we saw with the sex offender moral panic, or the 2011 riots, or Brexit. The disgusting rise of 'Boris' Johnson and the malign stick insect, Liz Truss. It all makes horrible sense.

I don't hate Diana. She tried to ride the tiger that was eating her, and it just ate her harder. The only ones who had the right to mourn her were the ones made to perform like circus seals for the benefit of lachrymose louts and vulgar prats.

(And on a slight tangent, Elton John mangling one of his best songs at her funeral was neither here nor there. It was to be expected from music's greatest multicolour train wreck. Brilliance one minute, balderdash the next.)

But Diana's death robbed us of honesty, both about her and from her. You can't libel a corpse, but it's not the done thing to malign one either.

(You know, rather than wasting all that money on flowers, they could have donated it all to AIDS and landmine charities. Just saying.)

Speak iII of the Dead

I don't hate the Queen either. She bailed out her scumbag nonce son, and generally mismanaged her other kids. She was a penny pincher, a reactionary and a force for stagnation and slow decline. We have less bomb sites than when she took over, but we have far more ugly, blocky town centres and slum HMOs masquerading as des res rentals. She came to the throne as an imperialist and died as the UK spirals into a corporate bordello, human rights black spot, and cesspit. The music was good, though.

And yet, she polished that turd with such skill and precision, it's hard not to be impressed. For all the scandals and turbulence, the monarchy stayed stubbornly popular during her time. Her ability to reach out and empathise, to impress and charm Presidents, ex-IRA men and theocrats alike... That air of affability and authority. The solemnity and always being able to make the right gesture at the right time... 

She was the greatest marketing and PR genius of her time, albeit with help from a red-hot team of backroom flunkies and advisors. You could say that she 'misread the public mood' when Diana died. But it's very hard to predict how a bunch of mutants are going to react during such moments of unhinged folly. 

She plainly DGAF at this point.

Everyone gets dewy eyed and sentimental about the Paddington skit she took part in during this year's Jubilee, which would turn out to be her last. But watch it again, take a step back and marvel at one of the best media operators in the business. Her timing and balance between formality and self-parody was perfect. Her ability to subtly turn the tables so the illegal immigrant bear from Peru became the straight man was nimble to say the least. 

Who else could pull out a marmalade sandwich with that smile and timing? She was very, very good at what she did. It was all much harder than it looked.

But she was no cynic. She took her role as figurehead of a nation seriously. She was the Uber-Vicar at the Church of England, a living shredding machine of duty and sheer brute force of purpose and intent. She gave her life to it, often to an excruciating degree.

Monk(ey) Business

Is this admirable? No, because that means admiring an iniquitous and bankrupt system. But it is tragic and sincere. She believed in what she did and what she gave up her life for. Wealth and palaces are unjust, yet the Queen still undertook a subtle asceticism at great personal cost. She was the most regal of birds in the most gilded of cages. 

Why does this picture remind me of Nigel Kneale's The Stone Tape?

The sheer weight of her duties and total loss of privacy may or may not make up for the sheer decadence of her lifestyle. Yet when you're 96, propped up on a stick, about to die, and you're still undertaking duties of state, it is impressive. But perhaps only in the way the most brutal, bloody performance art is, or French soldiers charging over piles of their own dead at Verdun.

She did it because she promised her father she would. He in turn ruined his life and health because he made a vow to a nation of arseholes after his lowlife Nazi brother sold them all out. There is much to discuss about how noble it is to live by an ideal, regardless of the cost, and whether we should allow someone to do that to themselves.

But the Queen had more in common with the self-embalming Buddhist monks of Japan. In their pursuit of an absolute, they petrified and tanned themselves into shrivelled auto-mummies. And if that's not a metaphor for the Queen's 70 year death march, there's always mellifcation. 

Duty can be a terrible thing, the most poignant and ironic form of self-harm there is.

And like many of those monks, the Queen's corpse is now on public display. There is something morbid, even depraved, about live footage of her coffin being slowly driven from Balmoral to Edinburgh. Is 'ghoulish' or 'voyeuristic' the right term? 

I couldn't help but be reminded of revenants and draugr, returning from the dead for one last banquet, visit home or stint in the bakery. Even in death, the toil continues, forever prim and proper, forever on display.

Remember what Sid Vicious said about the Man on the Street.

If Russia has shown it is founded on a foundation of raging sociopathy, so the British have shown they are in the grip of pathological narcissism. The sense of entitlement, self-pity, lurking menace and lack of real empathy are dead giveaways. So too is the manipulation, need to be pandered to, and envy. 

My local radio station described the long, long lines waiting to gawp at an old lady's corpse, and more importantly, to be seen doing so, as a 'snake'. Again, as metaphors go, it's bang on the nose. Be prepared for a long wait! (The government says.) Bring sandwiches!

"They're mourning like us!" one throne-dope gasped when William, Harry and their wives put on a fake smile, pretended they didn't hate each other, and mingled with the mourners. Nothing's changed in 25 years. The narcs must be appeased or there will be hell to pay. 

But there is a big difference between knowing of someone, and knowing them. Duty at all costs. Sokushinbutsu in waiting. And Prince Andrew's still not in jail.

Newspapers go black and purple, like a bruise. The Games Workshop web site posts up a solemn message in-between trying to sell us overpriced Space Dwarves. BBC news readers cosplay as the cast of Reservoir Dogs. 

But for all the absurdity, it's still worth remembering that this is a dangerous time. Opposing voices, whether in the best taste or not, are self-censoring or getting dog piled, arrested or ruined. The only way to be real is not to take part, to be silent.

The usual Twitter snarks are posting up hypocritically pious messages about 'respect', always the most passive aggressive of words. It's vomit-inducing. So too is the cynicism of a nation of old gits giving way to a zonked-out sentimentality. Like all ugly, incestuous families, the ranks set aside their squabbles and draw together against those deemed 'wrong' or 'other'. Floral Fascism.

It's a special kind of hell where CEOs and vice-chancellors send e-mails reminding us it's time to mourn, how to mourn, and when to get back to work, motherfuckers. How many of us furtively looked up whether we'd get a bank holiday, only to then upvote soppy Facebook posts with a 'Care' emoji? It's fake, all so utterly fake.

King Clarkie and the Muties

Which brings us neatly to Charles. While his mother sat on the throne in the manner of Jake La Motta, beaten but unbowed, he sags in his throne next to Camilla like an exhausted scrotum. He's lived for this moment his entire life. He has his shiny baubles at long last. Fuck him. 

We will have ten to twenty years of this before he too gets slow driven to an airport in a flag-draped coffin. It will, in comparison, be a blip. But he hasn't got his mother's skill or verve. His only virtue is patience. And he's now the corgi which finally caught the car. So, now what? NOW WHAT?

I still don't hate the Queen. She is free from it all, and more importantly, free from us. Cue drawings of her walking to heaven with a recently dead child, Winnie The Pooh, or Paddington himself, despite his immortality. But can her soul rest? Past precedent says otherwise. Her legacy will haunt our grandchildren. 

The one minute silence-or-else is at 20.00 BST, next Sunday. I will be playing The Queen Is Dead very, very loudly. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of monarchy, the British system and everything else, none of you cunts deserved her anyway.