I read a news story last week that felt less like a report and more like some kind of diffuse parable. A man in China was picking pine nuts in a forest using a hydrogen balloon to reach the cones up high. But the balloon became untethered, and he spent two days aloft, floating, as the balloon gradually deflated and he landed, unharmed, 200 miles away.
At the start of last week, a friend sent me that clip of Phillip Schofield spinning a wheel on British morning television for a caller to win the cost of their winter energy bills. “Quid Game,” I responded. For a few years now, we’ve bounced messages back and forth about whatever the latest eye-widening Tory wheeze is. You know the score: refugees to Rwanda; dinner ladies crying over having to refuse hungry children lunch; sewage-filled seas; Nigel Farage’s new brand of gin; Liz Truss moving her body while giving a speech about Chinese pork markets with all the awkwardness of an exoskeleton made of pipe-cleaners; the Tory press offering their latest tip in stiff-upper-lipping one’s way through energy and food poverty. (This particular strand always brings me back to a conversation I had with my father in 2016 a few months before the Brexit referendum. “Oh they’ll vote for that,” he said, convinced that the Brexiteer messaging was connecting with a certain cohort of English society. When I asked him why, he replied, “They love rations.”) Then there was Edwina Currie telling people not to put their couch in front of the radiator. On and on it goes.
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Archaic minutiae
This kind of stuff is often characterised as “dystopian”. But a dystopia is an imagined version of society, whereas this is a real one. It’s actually happening. When news of the British queen’s dire health broke on Thursday, I reread Sam Knight’s famous London Bridge Is Down article in the Guardian, outlining in fascinating detail what would happen in the event of her death, a remarkable torrent of archaic minutiae, a satisfying catalogue of procedure, ritual, rules, codes and the kinds of things steeped in understandings that have long evaporated and feel less like necessities and more like secret handshakes that once held meaning but now only the gestures remain. It was like that time an MP seized the ceremonial mace in parliament. It caused uproar, because it meant something serious – it’s just no one really knew what.
But of course it means something that a monarch is dead. It is another untethering for a deflating society, another tentpole removed from the ever-collapsing marquee called the United Kingdom, bunting dragging in puddles. Throughout the day, the BBC news coverage lost its reason. The black suits were donned before news of Queen Elizabeth II’s death was officially announced. Journalists in the soft-focus newsroom background raised their phones and filmed the moment. Remarkably, Michael D Higgins’ statement of condolence was read to the British public before Liz Truss loped towards a lectern with a black insignia, delivering words of performative comfort with all the emotional depth and rhetorical prowess of a hastily written diary of a child’s school tour by a parent covering for their kid’s homework-related forgetfulness.
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Empire shame
And then I saw a clip of Andrew Marr contextualising the existential gravity of it all: “When we were growing up, the empire was not unproblematic, but generally perceived to be something that we were proud of. We are now ashamed of the empire – many people in this country are ashamed of the empire. Our history is being constantly revisited. It may well be the United Kingdom breaks up in our lifetimes and Scotland goes her own way, and even Ireland is reunified. This is a time when almost everything that, as it were, conservative, traditional British people took for granted, is being shaken. And this is going to be the biggest shaking of all. Britain’s sense of herself is now under question in a way that hasn’t been seen before this event… The queen is part of the glue, a very important part of the glue. And it’s not just the institution. It’s not just her place inside the system of power, and it’s not even her place at the centre of London… She plugged us into 20th-century history in a way that no other human possibly could.”
The thing is, though, the 20th century is long over. Back on the BBC, a lengthy, ridiculous statement from Boris Johnson was read in full. It had the unhinged quality of a 4am taxi conversation between hugging friends departing a hen party. A royal analyst nodded soberly in agreement. Boris gets it was the conclusion. Watching this as an Irish person, I felt the BBC was falling hook, link and sinker for a moment Johnson must be raging to have just missed out on. Never mind, the comeback is on.
The death of someone who was “always there” leaves a gap in the consciousness. Unfortunately, what Britain has been inflating its sense of self with in recent years weighs little more than gas in a balloon. If, in grief, people often feel disassociated and on auto-pilot, then what kind of reality will snap back for a society deflating and untethering in front of our eyes long before last Thursday afternoon?