The fact there's a livestream of people walking past a coffin in any sense is so...gross? I completely don't get it at all.
At this point The Queue is just a premise to a Stephen King short story I read on holiday twenty years ago
I find the museum-esque voyeurism undignified. All and sundry filing past like a fairground attraction after waiting on the street for 10 hours. Very tacky.
According to an asparagus psychic, Charles will abdicate next year so we should be spared for quite a while. https://www.somersetlive.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/king-charles-abdicate-next-year-7592703
It'll be fascinating to see how it all plays out because the landscape has changed so much since the last coronation seventy years ago. People accepted Elizabeth's ascension to the throne because a vast proportion believed she was God's representative on earth. Though how much longer are we going to accept the Windsors as ceremonial figureheads as religion becomes more and more irrelevant in society and our daily practices? I'm relatively apathetic to the monarchy personally but I totally understand the arguments for abolishing it entirely. I guess my question would be the practicalities of that - what happens to the palaces? Do they all just get normal jobs? Who would be our Head of state instead? The family (rather than the institution, I would argue, given how ridiculous the pomp and ceremony feels at the moment) is so embedded in our culture that it's hard to imagine an alternative. People often claim the "but tourism!" argument with the royal family in the sense that they bring in more to the country in terms of tourism revenue each year than they cost the taxpayer but it would be interesting to know if they actually do give more than they receive in terms of our economy.
The Crown Estate is property they own by virtue of being the monarch and is managed by the government. All Crown Estate land including Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace, Holyrood and Regent’s Street (and the royal art collection) should remain part of the state. Use the art to turn palaces into art galleries/museums like the Louvre/Versailles. Turn some into council housing. They own Sandringham and Balmoral as private citizens and could keep those. In a lot of European royal families, everyone apart from the monarch and the heir get normal jobs. Charles is meant to want to streamline the royal family so some of them might get real jobs anyway. They could always do posh people stuff like Zara Tindall being an equestrian. The easiest system for a head of state would be having an independent ceremonial figurehead president like Ireland or Barbados, which both removed the British crown with presidents in 1949 and 2021 respectively. The president would do all the state functions the monarch carries out, the opening of parliament, signing laws, asking the leader of a party who can command a majority to be PM. Executive power would stay with the PM. But ideally you’d have a directly elected president who could veto a law they profoundly disagreed with (unlike a monarch as it would cause a constitutional crisis. Ideally you’d write a constitution while you were doing this, giving directly applicable human rights guarantees. Getting rid of the House of Lords at the same time would be good, potentially replacing it with a senate of the nations/regions.
So there’s now a queue to join the queue. Is she even in the box or stored in a walk-in freezer at The Ivy for now?
I can just see a grand film being made out of this whole thing. Reminds me of Madonna’s Evita when she dies abd everyone wanting to see her coffin/body
Do you these people in the queue camp overnight or something or does everyone in the main queue get in to see the coffin within a 24 hour period? I was wondering where these people are sleeping / resting as surely you can’t stay overnight in a hotel and rejoin the queue where you left off, don’t really get the mad people doing it?
They’re just walking and stopping all night: There are portaloos and shops along the way and they get wristbands so people can’t push in.
No, unfortunately it’s real. I went past Southwark park last night and they were filling up the park to start queuing at 11pm. Was so busy I was astonished and took this:
