Queues and Cyphers

There was an unusually long queue in the supermarket – so long that the head of it was out of sight. 'Oh well,' said the man ahead of me, 'so long as the Queen's coffin's at the end of it...' A nice example, I thought, of stoical English humour, and of our mastery of the art of queuing, in which we surely lead the world. Those days of patient, good-humoured queuing to silently file past the royal catafalque showed the watching world how these thing should be done, as did the impeccably managed pageantry that accompanied the funeral itself. I found it gratifying that we can still do these things so well (largely, I suspect, because much of the organisation is in the hands of the armed forces), and the behaviour of the queues showed that English decency, quiet humour and restraint – three of the late Queen's signal virtues – still thrive in the population at large. As so often, the impression of the nature of this country given by the commentariat and the media, especially social media, is wide of the reality. Not that this lesson will have been learned; we are already back to business as usual. 

Meanwhile the new King has chosen his royal cypher – 

That's a Tudor crown, rather than the St Edward's crown that surmounted his mother's cypher. Let's hope that means he's serious about being Defender of the Faith. As for the cypher, it's serviceable and effective, but I was hoping for a little more dash. Here is what his predecessor Queen Anne managed to do with only the letters A and R to work with –

                                                                That's more like it.