I went on a photo-gathering trip to London yesterday, while preparations for the Queen’s funeral were in full swing.
The train station was warning people not to join The Queue.
Shop windows were full of Queen Elizabeth images/merch, and also Paddingtons. It infuriates me how Paddington has become associated with the Queen but more on that some other time.
This is not just public mourning! This is M&S public mourning!
Flowers and flags popping up in all sorts of places.
The Marble Arch area was packed with people. I did get this nice picture of a bird though.
Onto Hyde Park. People and police everywhere, and a load of screens and portaloos set up for the funeral.
(other crowds, cops, & the odd yelling person not pictured.)
Found a weird beehive type thing and an unbothered raven.
Apparently this also happened in Hyde Park:
The Holocaust Memorial Garden in Hyde Park has now become a makeshift Queen Memorial Garden pic.twitter.com/1UNG54mXLv
and I’m glad I didn’t see that because I would have lost my fucking mind. Just a really, really shitty thing to do. (The part of me that still has a shred of optimism about human nature wonders if some of those flowers, the ones unmarked by any Queen pictures, genuinely were for Holocaust victims but I suspect not. I mean, I hope so, I just suspect not.)
On lighter notes…
I do like this pic of the Union Jacks at half-mast, it came out really well.
This shot of a plane going past a statue isn’t too bad either.
Oh look more Paddingtons, Paddingtons everywhere. Wouldn’t it make SO MUCH more sense for these to be given to refugee kids who arrive in Britain with no toys?
So Buckingham Palace itself was closed off but the area around it was MENTAL.
The tributes from children I suppose are touching in a way, but only in the same sense any children’s drawing left out in the rain is.
Those photos probably don’t give the full scale of everything but hopefully this video does.
Absolute chaos I tell you. So were the surrounding areas.
Piccadilly Circus looked beautiful but police were everywhere.
There was a moment of silence for the Queen on the train! ON THE TRAIN! Madness. A voice came over the tannoy asking for a minute’s silence but most people in the carriage were asleep anyway.
Got home and was informed shortly afterwards that my grandmother had taken a turn for the worse. Apparently, she can’t even recognise her family members now. It absolutely sucks. But the country won’t stand still for her, will it.
Surgeries and operations are being cancelled on the day of the queen’s funeral. These patients will have been on a waiting list for months if not years.
Often there are juxtapositions on the BBC news website that I have to screenshot. This one is about one death vs many deaths but only one is the headline news with the black background.
Literally my husband was saying yesterday he’d start wearing heavier clothes in the winter instead of turning on the heating to save money… While the Queen’s funeral is going to cost millions of pounds.
Say what you want about the Queen but meeting Liz Truss and immeadiately dying after 96 years of perfect health is themost iconic way imaginable to immeadiately shadow that awful womans entire prime ministership in bad omens and misery. honestly what a way to take one for the team
every single channel is airing news of the queen’s death except E4 which refuses to interrupt reruns of the big bang theory
I remember them doing the same thing for Philip’s death, in that case it was the Dave channel refusing to interupt that Red Bull Soapbox Race thing where everyone ends up crashing into hay bales.
What a strange day it’s been. One day before my wedding anniversary actually. I saw “Balmoral” trending on Twitter and it turned out to be a news story about how the Queen was in ill health. Lots of wisecracks scrolling down. (My favourite was “She meets Liz Truss and starts dying the very next day, I respect that.”)
Later on today I marvelled at how much better I was feeling post-breakdown, I’m on some fantastic new meds. I decided to fix the TV box since it had been messing up since pre-breakdown and making the image flicker on and off all the time. I got it working properly and immediately, a black screen and an announcement saying “Stand by for a message from the BBC” like I’ve heard in World War II-set movies.
“Holy crap, she’s actually dead!” I told my husband.
She was indeed Actually Dead. But I suppose the Queen isn’t really what I want to talk about. There’s not a huge amount to say, I’ve never met her (a few members of my family have gone to special Palace events where she was there, but that’s all) and she lived a long, charmed life.
Actually I want to talk about my grandmother. She was born two weeks before the Queen was in April 1926. She went through World War II at the same age the Queen did, but in considerably more danger than the Queen was, because she was working class and from a working class area that was very heavily bombed. She ended up joining the Wrens, I think, though I don’t know what she did there. Here’s a pic of her, clumsily colourized by an app:
I just take a weird sort of pleasure in knowing that a working class woman outlived the Queen, I guess. She’s in a care home now on the other side of the country, I plan to visit her soon.
the public waiting to see if the queen is dead while the country is on the brink of collapse reminds of my gcses like “you know apparently if someone dies during the exam everyone gets full marks” and then looking around your year group like
