Don't Stop The Clocks

I started watching the walking videos during the first lockdown. The initial fascination was the empty streets: normally busy areas like Piccadilly Circus or the South Bank completely empty of the life that used to fill them. When the lockdowns began to lift the attraction was in watching people returning to those same streets - and now, it's in the opportunity to witness street life in all corners of the globe - London yes but also New York, Tokyo, Barcelona, Seoul - these days, you name pretty much any city and someone in it will have strapped a Go-Pro to themselves and took to the streets. I just tried it for Lagos, Nigeria and sure enough, yep, someone's done it. Buenos Aires? You got it. Wanna walk alongside the Ganges in Varanasi? You can. It isn't just the great world cities either - if you want, you can take a virtual walk around Macclesfield, or Yeovil, or Halifax - whether in Yorkshire or Nova Scotia.

You can even have a look around my manor if you like. 

Why, today of all days, am I writing about the walking videos? Well, partly because it seemed appropriate given Saturday's entry. And partly because these videos tell us a truth about city life which we won't see in footage on the news of London today, with the normal business of city life stilled this time not because of a virus that threatens all humanity but in order to cosset the grief of a single absurdly powerful family, the normally active, milling crowds replaced with a passive audience watching a single coffin be escorted to Westminster Abbey. 

And I don't use the word 'cosset' lightly. One of the most heartening things about watching someone walk part of the length of The Queue on Saturday was watching as it got away from the display of roided-up security theatre in Westminster and started snaking along the opposite side of the river, where all the usual overpriced bars and allegedly artisanal food trucks were still hawking their wares, and where people outside of the queue were enjoying the riverside as they would on any other sunny summer night on the South Bank. 

And that is one of the lessons about grief I learned from having to watch all the Jubilee celebrations going on while I was mourning the death of my mother back in May. It's what every normal person who grieves has to deal with. The outsize popularity of Auden's Funeral Blues is owed mostly to its inclusion in Four Weddings and a Funeral, but there is a reason Richard Curtis chose it for that film. Nothing is more human than the urge to stop the world from turning in our grief. That urge is understandable. But it is also right and proper that the world frustrates the urge. Life does go on. As Auden observed in his better, far less lachrymose Musee des Beaux Arts the greatest truth about our personal suffering is that it happens while others are 'eating or opening a window or just walking dully along', and that even those who are witness to the tragedy, such as, in the painting by Breughel to which Auden refers, 'the expensive, delicate ship that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky' - or, one thinks, a queue of people stretching from Parliament to Southwark Park - have 'somewhere to get to, and sail...calmly on'. 

Unless those who happen to be grieving happen also to have the surname Windsor. 

There are lots of things I object to about the Monarchy. They are an institution which represents the worst evils in the world, and are personally guilty of many of those evils themselves. They are the beneficiaries of privilege, private law, in its most literal sense - Elizabeth Windsor interfered in over 1000 laws to prevent them affecting her via the 'Queen's Consent' process.  A lot of that interference was motivated by a desire to protect her wealth, a protection she very generously extends to her friends among the ultra-wealthy (like that nice Mr Epstein) via the network of 'Crown Dependencies', aka tax havens or secrecy jurisdictions, over which she until very recently presided, and which her son Charles now oversees.

But another thing I object to about the institution of the Monarchy is how badly it deforms the people who belong to it. We are going to see a lot of evidence of how deformed, psychologically, those people can get in the reign of Charles Windsor, if his inability to tolerate leaky pens is any indication. And one of the reasons why they become so warped as individuals is because of days like today when, uniquely of all families in the UK, of all families in the world, the Windsors are allowed to do the very things Auden's funereal poem lists as examples of the absurd and overreaching desires of grief, and to bring a stop to the business of ordinary, ongoing life he writes about in Musee des Beaux-Arts. The traffic policemen may not quite wear black cotton gloves, but they are out in force on the streets of the capital today, along with members of every branch of the armed services and, no doubt, many plainclothes SIS operatives, all acting in concert to ensure no peal of mocking laughter or cry of accusation is allowed to spoil the officially mandated national mood. The shops are shut (with a few noble exceptions - I shan't name the branch of Subway which was my only option this morning for fear of sending royalist reprisals their way, but I am pathetically grateful in the way only a fat person in receipt of a greasy breakfast can be that they chose to stay open), roads are closed, and radio stations are strictly adhering to the two mandated playlists of 'Mood One: sad music' and 'Mood Two: saddest music'. Every news broadcaster local to this country, and even Al Jazeera English, who are usually my go-to when the rest of the news is full of Royal weddings, broadcast the funeral. 

The most important of grief's lessons is that the world doesn't share in your grief. That is something which those in The Queue who were grieving (as opposed to those who came out to gawp in the tradition of the London Mob) were brought face-to-face with on Saturday night. That is something I had to face up to when I sat outside a pub in Tynemouth covered in Jubilee bunting crying over the death of my mother. And it's a lesson which Heaven and Earth will be moved to protect our pampered Royals - and you do not live to 96 without some heavy pampering, whatever sycophants might say about the late Mrs Windsor's 'selfless service' - from ever having to learn.