The empty seat

Cartoon by Morten Morland, a Norwegian cartoonist based in the UK

 This cartoon is being shared a lot; it appeared in today's Times. 

 I think it strikes a chord on many levels (which is actually what a chord is, isn't it?).

Those of us who watched the State Funeral today (and we couldn't resist) had an opportunity: to see beyond the pageantry, symbolism, and sentiment.

We feel a loss, but it's more than a seemingly omnipresent and immortal Queen.  It's a way of life, and a way of seeing things, which, however myopic, was something taken for granted.

Many of us looked over to a chair, and realised, probably not for the first time, that a flawed, maddening, but beloved person no longer was sitting there.  Perhaps we thought:  Oh s/he would have loved/hated this.

I was lucky today.  I escorted Demeter from her apartment to watch bits and pieces of the ceremonies.  We drank tea, of course. Afterwards, we discussed which members of the Royal Family we'd seen over the years.  (They come to Canada quite a bit.)

And I realised that my very British mother actually only lived in England for about a decade, if you include her first year of life, and home furloughs from Kenya.

Then I escorted her home, and went for a walk in the sunset.

It seemed appropriate.

Why do you ring ding ding?

 When I first heard the "Elizabeth Serenade", I thought it was a German folk-song.

I went to school with a girl named Antje.  We weren't best friends, but friendly enough to visit each other's houses.  Antje's mum, who was German, was a single mother, like mine, and I knew her from her volunteer work in our Guide troop.

I remember a visit on a sunny day.  They had a small house down by Craigflower Creek, which flowed under the bridge near our school.

Antje's mum put a recording on, which began with flutes sounding rather like those in the Dance of the Reed Pipes in Tchaicovsky's The Nutcracker. 

"Isn't this Beautiful?!"  she enthused, teutonically.

It was certainly pretty.  The feathery flutes were followed by a chorus singing lustily in German, interspersed with what sounded like aggressive handbells, a wee bit jarring, but I looked out at the water flowing by the house and listened appreciatively.

It was years until I learned that this piece was originally an instrumental (which, frankly, suits it better), composed by Ronald Binge, some time around 1951.  It didn't really have a title - apart from Andante Cantabile, but when Britain suddenly found itself with a pretty 25-year-old queen in 1952, it was renamed Elizabethan Serenade.  

This recording by Ron Goodwin and his orchestra is probably the most recognizable arrangement of the piece.  George Martin, who, years later, would produce the Beatles, had a hand in producing this one, and it's a pleasant listen.  Easy, you might say.  As ear-worms go, there are far worse.

Of course, then someone had to write lyrics for it.  I'll spare you.  The title of this post is ripped from Christopher Hassall's verses, for which the kindest adjective is "twee".  Google it if you must.

I rather expected to hear the Elizabethan Serenade over the past ten days, instead we're getting a lot of Nimrod.

It may be a moot point; I heard some years ago that Queen Elizabeth really wasn't much of a music-lover, which must have made sitting through all those concerts, ballets, shows, and operas a challenge.

She'll be getting more than enough music tomorrow, but then, I guess she won't have to hang around.

The p word

When I was in Grade Two, we did a Social Studies unit on "Indians".  This was before the terms "Indigenous" and "First Nations".  I think it's safe to say that our teachers didn't know any better.

It was a time when the residential schools were still in operation, and little boys played "Cowboys and Indians".

On a special project day, we came to school dressed as "Indians".  I lived in Edmonton, so the emphasis was on Plains "Indians".  My mother fixed me up with one of my soft dolls bundled and strapped to my back.  One of the boys punched it in the face as a joke.

That's the last time I recall hearing the word "papoose".

Last night, I came across an essay on the BBC web site, under, of all things, the "Entertainment and Arts" section, presumably because the author, Mark Savage, is a music columnist. 

This piece was about the increasingly legendary Queue that stretches from Westminster Hall, where the Queen's body lies in state, to Southwark Park on the south bank of the Thames, a distance of just under five miles. 

Savage writes of the peaceful atmosphere emanating from the live telecast of the Lying in State, and says he often leaves the livestream on, while doing things around his home. He speaks warmly about the people passing through the hall on either side of the catafalque, remarking on spotting many masks.  (I've seen about half a dozen masks amongst the thousands of people, but then, I don't keep the telecast on for long periods.)

And it was when he described the many types of people passing through the great hall, that my jaw dropped to my knees: There are women in hijabs and wearing papooses... 

Click to enlarge

I was getting ready for bed at the time, and shut down the web site, feeling startled and slightly sick.  I was surprised at how upset I felt, upset enough to fumble with my phone for an official definition of this long-forgotten word. 

This seems to indicate that "papoose", as a synonym for what I called a baby sling or carrier* when the girls were infants, is mainly in use in the UK, and I recalled how, as delightful as my British rellies are, they had an unfortunate tendency to make references to "Red Indians" (cringe) and persist in calling Inuit people "Eskimos", a sidebar to their generally dismissive attitudes to Canada and Canadians. 

Still -- "papoose"??? On a BBC web site? Would they call maternity clothes "squaw-wear"? 

This morning, I texted elder daughter in London.  As a millennial who has spent much of her early adulthood correcting stone-age parental attitudes, her response surprised me:  she made the casual claim that she'd heard it used in Canada fairly often.  I sent her the dictionary definition and she seemed taken aback.

I don't, for a moment, think that Mark Savage is a red-neck, but his careless and sentimental vocabulary underscores why we've been hearing less than complimentary messages from groups wounded by things done in Elizabeth's name.

Call 'em baby slings or carriers, Mr Savage. The p-word does you no favours, and it rather ruined my evening.

*Actually, the Resident Fan Boy reminds me that we called the baby carrier by its brand-name: "Snuggli". Since I'm calling out the BBC, I feel compelled to add: many other brands of baby slings are available.

Alignment

I was going to avoid mentioning the upcoming royal funeral until it actually happens next Monday.  More than enough is being mentioned already.

However, we are all British descendants in our house, and elder daughter lives in the UK, so naturally, we've been tuning into the death festival that's been taking place for the last week.  

Yesterday, while searching for YouTube recordings to show Demeter, who has no internet, I stumbled across the continuous live streaming of the Great British public (plus a large number of tourists) making their steady way in two lines past the Queen's coffin, which is lying in state at Westminster Hall.

It's oddly compelling viewing.  These are people who have waited for hours and hours for the privilege of a moment's pause to bow, genuflect, namaste, or whatever, before trotting back to their lives.  I'm astounded to see some people have brought strollers, or ambulant young children.

Yesterday evening, I discovered there's a "Queue-Tracker" on YouTube.  At that point, the Queue (capitalised, like the Queue at Wimbledon) was two and a half miles long, stretching back to Southwark Bridge on the South Bank of the Thames.

This morning, when I arose, it was 4.2 miles long, and I've just checked, it's 4.9 miles long.  My understanding is that the "cut-off" point is five miles, when, so the Twitter wags suggest, a queue will then be formed for the Queue.

A popular thread on Twitter declares that this Queue is performance art.  It's certainly bonkers, but like a road accident, I can't look away.

Intimations of mortality

On Last Week Tonight last night, John Oliver, on the record as not being a fan of the Royal Family, made a quip about Britain being bowled over because "a 96-year-old woman died of natural causes".

I am a fan of John Oliver, so I wasn't particularly bothered by this statement, much like I think arresting Scottish protesters for holding up placards about abolishing the monarchy during the Queen's funeral procession is overkill.  Their protests may not be in particularly good taste, but it's their right, and hauling them off to jail is pretty much against what the Queen stood for, isn't it?

But I recalled the Oliver quip this morning when a "retweeted" "thread" showed up on my Twitterfeed:
 

What can we learn from the death of the #Queen?

The world has watched her live through the process of #OrdinaryDying, and yet dying went unspoken, un-named.

Let's notice what nobody mentioned: we all saw the Queen going through the stages of ordinary dying.

A thread..

1/ pic.twitter.com/5bYoZIXUvq

— Kathryn Mannix (@drkathrynmannix) September 11, 2022

This stopped me in my tracks.

If you follow the link you can read the whole thread, which consists of twelve tweets, from Dr Mannix, who is a retired palliative care doctor and author -- a thanatologist, if you will.

I made the mistake of not "liking" it or bookmarking it on my phone; I was at Demeter's, doing her laundry and waiting for her to wake up.

Twitter is like a rolling, roiling river of comments, smart remarks, photos, "threads", and memes, so when I went to look for the thread half an hour later, it had been swept away by other items.  I only knew that the reason I'd seen it in the first place is that the Resident Fan Boy's second cousin once removed, a doctor herself whose physician husband wrote a bestseller about his own impending death, had retweeted it.

After nearly an hour at my home computer, doing every search I could think of on Twitter, I simply entered a few keywords into Google, and there it was.

Two tweets hit me hard:

The changes began slowly.
Initially, we realised that she was less energetic year by year.
This is the stage of dying when life expectancy is usually still measured in years.

After Prince Philip died she was noticeably more tired, her public appearances less frequent, her energy less reliable. Losing weight, walking with a stick: changing month by month, a stage that usually indicates life expectancy measured in months.

I'm a witness to my mother's final years, maybe months, according to Dr. Mannix - although Demeter has used a stick for years, and her weight fluctuates.  However, I do recognize the signs.

Years ago, I joined Victoria Hospice as a volunteer, for two reasons:  I realized in my late teens, that death was something no one acknowledged, even in a time where all topics were supposedly no longer taboo; and Demeter had brought my grandmother to live in Canada, and I knew I would be facing her death soon.  (It was over a decade later.)

It's been years since my time with the hospice, and I'm out of practice.  I do remember, that when people I knew came to the hospice to die - Victoria being not a particularly large city - that I could tell when the end was near when I entered the room and had trouble recognising them.  Not due to disfigurement, you understand, but when people are nearing death, they stop looking like themselves.  It's hard to explain, if you haven't experienced this, but more than once, I quickly checked the name tag on the door to assure myself I had the right room.

The other thing I remember is that health professionals working with the dying have a reason for not giving estimates of the time left.  We would have patients who were with us for months, despite appearing very weak and ill, and others, alert and ambulatory when I came in for my weekly shift, would be gone by the time I arrived for the next one.

However, this Twitter thread has reeled me in, and I will be paying closer attention to what Demeter says and doesn't say, plus what she does and doesn't do.

Dr Mannix concludes:

Dying in plain sight, camouflaged by briefings about 'mobility issues' and medical advice to 'rest.' Because like anyone else, the Queen was entitled to some privacy about her health, and to die away from the public gaze.

But we all saw the process.

Rest in peace, Ma'am.

So John Oliver was right.  A 96-year-old woman died of natural causes, as we watched.  Because she was a privileged person, she died prepared and supported.

I know not the time, but I'm on alert. 

Not taking debate

There's quite a war going on in social media about whether this is the time for debate about the continued existence of the British monarchy, especially when the debate consists of tweets, some in decidedly questionable taste. 

I'd take the hint to take a break from social media until say, October or so, except I keep running into the occasional gem.

I do think comic relief will become increasingly necessary over the next couple of weeks of lamentation, no matter what you thought of the late Queen, so here is a possible way to joke gently, done by a Canadian, of course. 

The Canadian is "Brittlestar" (real name: Stewart Reynolds), who is based in Stratford, Ontario, and if you're unclear of the situation with Lisa LaFlamme -- well, actually, this video explains it pretty well.

Another amber moment

On my Twitterfeed this morning

I awoke early this morning; the Resident Fan Boy was celebrating his birthday by going into the hospital for minor surgery. 

In between pulling on my clothes and brushing my teeth, I quickly checked my social media feeds and was arrested by a tweet from Elizabeth Renzetti, a former Globe and Mail columnist whom I follow on Twitter.

Apparently the newsreaders at BBC News had quietly changed into black suits.

Things still needed to get done:  seeing the RFB off in the taxi, then crossing the street to go set up Demeter's breakfast.  I continued to check whatever media was available.  The commentary was vague, but pretty ominous.

I was washing up Demeter's breakfast plates, when elder daughter texted me from London at 10:36 our time.

She simply sent the words of the message that was fastened to the gates at Buckingham Palace:  The King and Queen Consort will return to London tomorrow.  "So odd."

"We'll get used to it soon," I assured her.

I didn't ask her if she could see the rainbow from South Wimbledon.