At the back of my cutlery drawer, my fingers graze the tarnished coronation teaspoon that was the sugar spoon in my family for all my growing up. My mother came by it in 1952 upon the accession of Princess Elizabeth Windsor to the throne of England. I sincerely doubt that my ever-thrifty mother went out and bought the spoon. It was probably a freebie handed out in the kind of forced celebration we have been witnessing this week upon the death of said queen. Yesterday, to commemorate the queen's funeral, the entire UK was shut down - no airplanes, no doctor's visits, no chemo appointments, no weddings, no other funerals. If they could have sutured pregnant women's vaginas shut, there would have been no births either.
You would be forgiven for thinking this kind of state control smacks of the deaths of dictators in more repressive regimes, but in some ways it is worse. You can force a reluctant populace to go through the motions of grief, but in London at Westminster, there were subjects lined up for miles and many hours, wiping their tears as they walked past the queen's coffin (whether or not there was an actual body inside.) The last couple in line told reporters that this was the biggest day of their lives, surpassing the births of their three children.
The BBC, which used to have a reputation as an upstanding purveyor of news and quality television, has shifted in recent years to toeing the government line. So, once the death of the queen was announced, the beeb went into overdrive, covering the queue past the coffin at Westminster twenty four hours a day.
I understand that we live in desperate times, that the three year pandemic has taken its toll on the minds of humankind. If you want to dig deeper, you could recognise this mental instability as a result of the breakdown of the Empire and or of Christianity which is on very loose footing these days on the British island. The ebb of a moral compass that has governed the hearts and minds of a populace back into the misty shades of recorded history is no inconsequential drift.
But the hysteria surrounding the passing of a ninety-six year old monarch in England (judging by the sparse attendance in Edinburgh's Holyrood Park, the Scots felt differently) was, well, hysterical. The Left Bank TV production The Crown has in recent years displayed for all to see the depth of dysfunction that lies at the heart of this royal family. I won't go into the untimely death of Diana (though satirist Trevor Noah did), but the proscriptions for who should marry whom, the poor children left to the care of nannies, the pathology of the "stiff upper lip," the strangeness of lives lived to the drumbeat of a past (and brutal) empire, would give any good psychologist a field day.
It's hard to topple icons. It is proving near impossible to indict obviously criminal former American president Donald Trump. But when that icon lives rent free in the minds of its subjects, the task is even harder. We all grew up wth Queen Elizabeth as the model of decorum, as the height of a social ladder that only the pedigreed few could climb. When I was a girl, I marvelled at royal speech. No one else quite speaks like that. It requires a certain quality of pole in the rectum. But back then I didn't want to be another anonymous Scottish girl with a Scottish accent. In the sixth verse of the empire hymn, the National Anthem, is a line about crushing the rebellious Scots. I didn't want to be in the way of the crushing engine that levelled my agency and left me no credence.
Many, many years later, royal speech, like royal authority, rings hollow in my ears. You cannot ignore the steam roller that accompanies the march of the Empire and everything the royal family represents. The younger royals have tried to look more accessible, have tried to present themselves as just anther family. But what does it do to the mind of a little George VII that he will one day ascend to the throne of England? The best of the royals have tried to get out, but there is never enough time to escape the swipe of the steam roller. Princess Margaret, Princess Diana, many others who were hid from sight, and now Prince Harry have tried thrusting through the thorny forest to escape the shadow of the castle.
In the past week, I have had to look away from the spectacle of a week-long funeral pageant in the name of such an obviously flawed institution. As a Scot, coming down from ancestors who were moved off their land in the Highland clearances and who were disregarded by the powers that have since 1707 resided in London, it all leaves me with a nasty taste, a bitter pill, and not one that even a spoonful of sugar from my mother's royal spoon will ever dispel.
The queen's death at Balmoral in the highlands of Scotland was well orchestrated. She famously feared the break up of the Union, and this was her final gesture. But, as a Scot by birth, it is my hope that this symbol of the queen's death in Scotland will carry into history a different weight. Just as the icon of the British Empire gave out her last breath on Scottish soil, so let the union follow swiftly behind.
