Having avoided it for the most part, thinking it impossible to draw any conclusion from an exceptional spectacle, as I arrived back in London on Sunday after visiting a friend in Exeter, I took the plunge and stayed on the Bakerloo to Embankment.
I joined the queue at the Southbank Centre and walked parallel, hoping to pick up fragments of conversation. It all turned out to be Very Pleasant; they found a way to bring together everyone who clapped for the NHS. A conga line of possible performative niceness, shuffling through a fair-minded fair-ground of grief.
And right on cue, one of the stewards started instructing the queuers to continue ‘behind the carousel’. The hardest thing about facing death is that life just continues, and here were the grievers having to curve round a machine that takes children on a halcyon ride of pageantry involving horses and piped Victorian music.
I continued walking parallel to the queuers, wondering if the queue to see the previous dead monarch’s coffin was this gleeful; so pleased to be involved. People had pints and cans, union flag blazers, people were dressed in all black, scouts and their older counterparts, the military, were there.
If you’ve ever heard ‘Upon Westminster Bridge’ by Half Man Half Biscuit, the picture it paints is what was forming in my head as I arrived opposite the Houses of Parliament, where I decided to go no further. The retail park paraders and the Guardian recipe crusaders were having their moment in the setting sun.
But what was the overall mood? How were the people in the queue feeling? Or, more importantly, how did they want you to think they were feeling? To try and find out, I got up a scrolling text banner app on my phone and had it flash ‘Say how you’re feeling’ on it as I headed back.
You can listen for yourself at the top of this blog, but overall people felt ‘great’ or ‘tired’. There were also a couple of seemingly canned responses. Would the banter merchants and anti-monarchists admit that they’d queued 13 hours for the hell of it? Boring and uninspiring. Or perhaps I was only getting out what I was putting in.
I decided to head home after an hour as it was beginning to rain, and my equipment was more important than whatever I was trying to do here. Most people were there because they wanted to be part of the spectacle, and perhaps that’s what dragged me there too.
All those people, in one line, and I learned nothing new from the queue. The joke’s on me.
George Powell 