Once upon a time a queen died. She was 96 years old and she died in a big old castle in Scotland in 2022. The Queen, it is said, was a constant rock throughout her 70 year reign over her subjects, which isn’t hard because if a rock isn’t constant, it’s probably not a rock. She had blue eyes and an enchanting smile. She dressed like a stick of Blackpool rock and her hats were always the same colour as her frocks. She even had matching handbags but nobody knows what was in them, if anything at all. She liked horses and corgis and she shot birds out of the sky that had been especially bred just for that. She made sure that many laws that applied to her subjects didn’t apply to her or her land but she was the Queen so you be the judge on whether that was right or wrong.
It is said that one of her dying wishes was to see the end of Prime Minister Johnson, a flabby man that didn’t dress well or own a comb and had so many children even the Queen’s Mathematician couldn’t count them. She didn’t want him dead of course, just out on his ear.
Since the Magna Carta, a paper that says royals can’t be naughty and abuse their power, queens and kings have had to be careful with prime ministers. They don’t have to like them, though. This queen, Queen Elizabeth II, she thought Prime Minister Johnson was a bampot.
Prime Minister Johnson had made the Queen sad by having parties when the Queen’s husband died during the plague. He also made life a bit embarrassing for her by advising her to suspend the Parliament. He did this to stop Members of Parliament asking difficult questions about the Government’s crazy plan to leave the European Union (known as Brexit). Leaving the European Union would cause all sorts of problems for the people and animals and make many of the people cry but the Government said this was just ‘project fear’ and the people who didn’t want this Brexit were ‘talking down this great country’. Later project fear came to pass but that’s for another time when we look at the break up of the United Kingdom.
Anyway this suspension, known as prorogation (that was a big new word for lots of people in the country), was all very humiliating for the Queen because she ordered the suspension on the advice of the Johnson government and then the highest judges in the land said naughty naughty, that was against the law. What was a queen to do?
It was a man called Pincher, who was said to have groped two people at a dinner party (groping is a VERY BAD THING) that eventually brought Prime Minister Johnson down, not the naughty suspension of Parliament or the plague parties or any of the other one thousand and one scandals.
The United Kingdom was a funny old place then and the people were coming out of a plague that killed 190,000 and you just never knew what mud would stick and what mud would slide but either way a mud pie was a mud pie and we all liked slinging them, right?
So the Queen’s dying wish came true and the Queen said goodbye to Prime Minister Johnson and hello to Prime Minister Truss who wasn’t elected by the people but planted by an evil group of plotters who wanted to make the rich richer and the poor starve and freeze. Prime Minister Truss became famous on Twitter for her footballer curtsy and her witch’s hat and her strange fascination with cheese and pork markets.
After she said hello to Prime Minister Truss the Queen died and the people got a new king, King Charlies III. Some people thought that Prime Minister Truss poisoned the Queen but nobody dared say it out loud because in those days any old thing was treason even standing in the street holding a blank sign.
The Queen loved her subjects, and she also knew that all 68 million of them enjoyed a queue. So the Queen, whose favourite pastime was playing Snakes and Ladders with real snakes and real ladders, decided to gift her people a queue. This gift was to make up for the one thousand and one scandals under Prime Minister Johnson and the decimation of public services and the bedroom tax and all the sewage in the sea and rivers and the fact that people had to go to food banks and that fat cat landlords had got fatter and fatter and climate change was destroying everything and low traffic neighbourhoods were a war on the motorist. The Queen wasn’t that bothered about climate change but her son Charles was so she threw that in for good measure.
So the Queen prepared to gift to her people the longest most respectful queue in the world as part of her funeral arrangements. A queue for the Guinness Book of Records. A queue fit for the 21st century. A queue fit for the fifth longest-reigning monarch ever (Louis XIV beat her by two years and was more stylish by a country mile). The problem was she had to die to make the queue.
The Queen was very religious and although she was a Christian we don’t know if she prayed to the God of Queues. The God of Queues is interfaith and was available to everyone in the United Kingdom no matter what their religion or creed. We are still learning about the ceremonies associated with the God of Queues and whole departments in universities are dedicated to researching these curious rituals. The Queen wanted to make a queue to die for and she must have planned it for a long time, or at least have had her servants plan it. The Queue, for it had a capital Q just like the Queen, became a Thing.
There was an Edinburgh Queue and a London Queue but I refer to them here simply as the Queue. Both of these Queues involved people standing in a line for a very long time waiting to see a coffin with the dead queen. The coffin was closed and so the people could only see a box not a dead queen but the people didn’t mind this, they wanted to see the box.
Some famous people made sure they were seen by the box in their best hats. Prime Minister Truss wore a witch’s hat. The wives of the Queen’s grandsons wore large wide-brimmed black hats even though it wasn’t summer. A little princess wore a boater hat last seen in a children’s book in 1867. A lot of men wore funny hats that you have probably seen in museums.
Back to the Queue. The Queue had its own micro-climate, its own App, fans, critics, fawning journalists, tickets, security, sonnets, experts, anthems, selfies, signs, joining instructions, an unwritten constitution, pavement games, Dunkin-donuts, dancing police officers, commemorative memorabilia, three French hens, Twitter threads, TikTok memes, pickpockets, B-list celebrities, Facebook adverts, has-been footballers, jumpers, hipsters, bedazzled toddlers, history makers, history takers, dog creches, fish and chips, chicken salads, gin flasks, tea flasks, tea dances, felafels in wraps, Marks and Spencers hampers, bottled water, first-aiders, blank signs, sugar free Pepsi, men that were dragged off by the police, women that were followed by the police, hawkers, snake-oil merchants, litter-pickers, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers, socialists, monarchists, marxists, scientists, florists, breakfast TV has-beens, and a lot of shite spoken about very little at all.
The Queen, a wee old lady who died of wee old age and gifted her Queue to the masses, would have been thrilled.
SANDERLINGS 