Unless you have been living out at Ice Station Zebra for the past month, it can’t have escaped your attention that HRH Queen Elizabeth II has finally shuffled from this mortal coil.

It’s said that we all remember where we were whenever a significant event has happened.

I can’t say that’s the case with me… there must have been dozens of significant events in my lifetime, most of which have  just mixed with the dum-de-dum-de dum-de-dum constantly playing in my head. I can remember a few of them, though.

I remember my parents dragging me from the garden into the living room to watch man step foot on the moon, on our little black & white telly.  As it was nighttime here when they did so, I’m guessing we must have watched it on the news the following day. Either way, I was only seven years old and I don’t think the magnitude of the event resonated with me at the time.

When I was fifteen, we went on  one of our regular caravan holidays in Harwich (my grandparents owned a static one on a site). Each morning, it was my job to walk down to the little shop near the entrance to the site and pick up some milk, a loaf of bread and a copy of The Sun newspaper.  To this day, I can remember picking it up and saying “Wow!” out loud.  I ran back to the caravan excitedly to tell the news, but didn’t understand why my mum suddenly burst into tears when I told her that Elvis was dead.

In 2001, Mrs. Masher and I flew home from a holiday in Brazil.  Out of the airport, it was dull journey home around the M25 and I turned the radio on to help keep me awake.  Every station was broadcasting  reports of a terrible accident in New York, where an aircraft had flown into one of the towers of the World Trade Center.  This struck home with us, as we had been on the roof of the WTC only nine months previously.  As soon as we got home, we put the TV on and watched the smoke billowing from the tower and then our sorrow turned to abject horror as we watched the second plane hit Tower 2 and we realised – along with the rest of the world – that this was no accident.

And where was I when I learned of the death of Her Majesty?  I was walking the dog. We had just come out of the woods and as we strolled across the park, one of two teenage girls  who always sit on one of the park benches, drinking cider and smoking weed, shouted at me: “Hey Mister!”  I looked up.  “The Queen’s dead!” she hollered. Knowing that the Royal Family had been summoned to Balmoral earlier that day, following reports of the monarch’s frailty, I wasn’t really shocked to hear the news. But, it did catch me by surprise. “Oh, OK”, I said, not really being sure of how to respond to such a bombshell. “That’s a shame”.
I’m not a Royalist, by any means, but I’m also not anti-monarchy.  As with so many others, for me, the Queen has always just… been there.   But I think I’d liked to have received the news in a more fitting way than from a couple of skanks shouting at me from a park bench.