11th September
The Queen’s coffin is being taken by car from Balmoral to Edinburgh.
I’d been to ASDA for breakfast. The usual round of coffee machine needs cleaned before you can use it (their job not mine), no milk out for teas (so you need to queue again and ask for it), and the wrong breakfast order is delivered. But the staff are really pleasant, and you can always tell when there is tension between them (i.e. the service improves). No sign of the trolley brigade, this morning. This is a gang of retired folks who usually blitz the place the same time every Sunday morning. Maybe the rising costs have limited their visits. And there was one older man who walked slowly with a stoop that I used to see every weekend in there. I still see him now and again around the shopping centre.
HMV was shut for a week while they did a refit. Not sure I like the new layout. They have now moved and increased the merchandise section to the entrance. Which is okay if you want to buy a Stranger Things mug, clock or t-shirt, or a Chuckie doll (which I still think looks scarily like Liz Truss).
Popped to Waterstones. Tables looked quite bare. I’d read they were having problems with their distribution company. Or maybe they are just holding breath until the end of the week when a lot of new books are published.
Christmas cards are beginning to appear (that’s a bit of a lie, there have been cards around for a few weeks now).
I went out on the bike for a couple of hours late morning, then did some gardening (dead heading the dahlias; that always reminds of a scene from one of the Adam’s Family films where Morticia was live heading the healthy flowers), then sat down to watch a bit of the ongoing royal soap opera on the BBC. That’s a bit unfair probably, given that I actually found parts of the journey quite emotional. Amazed at the number of people who made a journey to a roadside to watch a hearse shoot past. The BBC commentary, as usual, was pretty distracting and even annoying. ‘This is history in the making’. ‘Everyone will remember where they were at this moment in time’. Well, yes they will. I don’t think many people spend Sunday afternoons sitting on a verge on the A90. The royal historian, Robert Lacey, should probably be locked in the Tower or a tower somewhere. The cortege was crossing the Queensferry Crossing, amazing arial views, and he was wittering on endlessly about King Charles III. Earlier in the broadcast he mistakenly associated Dundee with the oil industry and then started on about orange marmalade. Yes, it’s the kind of conversation you have as your granny is being taken to the crem.
And still the endless space filler of sound bite interviews with members of the public who reminisced about meeting her. ‘I was at the end of the line, and she smiled really nicely at me. I will remember that forever’. On the other hand, that reflects the power of the monarchy and the ways in which it is embedded in people’s emotions (although I still remember handing Lord George Brown his overcoat in an Edinburgh hotel on a rather wet afternoon. And he came across as a grumpy old bugger. Maybe he was better when drunk).
One Pagers 