London (Queens Funeral)

One morning sat in bed, the day after the queen died I said to John lets go down for the funeral. So we booked a hotel, at this point the date of the funeral had not been announced, just rumours. Looking at my credit card bill on our return this was not a good decision but I’m glad we did it. John is anti royals, I’ve never gone into the details of the pro’s and con’s of the royal family, I think I tend to be in favour, but I’d have to do a lot of research to decide. I do love pageant and ceremony. Of course we saw none of this, in fact I have not seen the funeral, only the highlights on the news. The first day we decided to wander to the front of Buckingham Palace and look at the flowers. All the roads around the palace were closed to traffic and on leaving Green park station you joined a queue. This was the norm for the next few days. This queue snaked for about 3 miles to enable you to walk past the front of the palace, where no flowers were displayed and then back into green park to see the flowers. Hard logical reality, it wasn’t worth it, I’ve stood in front of the palace so many times, in fact I used to lunch in in St James park everyday when I worked in London, and one of those times passing the front of the palace the queen and her mother were on the balcony waving at people. But hard logical reality isn’t one of my traits and I loved the “event”. In the evening we went and looked at “the queue”. The queue for the laying in state. Now if I had realised how that queue worked and that we would have spent most of the day in other queues I would have joined the laying-in-state queue at the start of the day, but we decided an 11 hours of queue wasn’t for us, and I now think that was a mistake. The day of the funeral was an early start, well aware one of my friends had slept on the Mall, I knew leaving the hotel at 7am was way too late. We headed to Green park and soon joined the queue to get into the park. Once in one of these queues you go where it goes. It is after all very British to queue. We tracked progress on the map trying to work out where we were aiming for. We wanted to be on the Mall, we thought we might be being pushed to Hyde park. Passed Green park the queue continued is snaking way down streets, away from Green park, back towards it, away again and at last into the park, quick decision left or right, we were being pushed into St James park, and the edge of the Mall. Only 7 people away from the road edge, Buckingham Palace just to our left. And only 8:30am. About 3 hours to the procession. The atmosphere was all that it was said to be. We were not individuals we were a group of people looking out for each other. Sweets, power bricks, food, covid, where exchanging hands. Even a bit of hight gradient, “your short come and stand in front of me”, “hi do you mind letting this child to the front”. Time passes, the service was played on speakers to the total silence of thousands of people, and eventually the procession. OK I confess, we didn’t really see anything. Later we caught the end of the windsor service on the large screens at hyde park. The next day we joined the queue for the british museum, but by now covid and lack of sleep (I never sleep in hotels) was biting so we didn’t do justice to the museum and we skipped the play we were going to do, thankfully we hadn’t got the tickets.