The Queen has only just gone but it seems like forever. She had placed herself at the centre of the Poppy Day experience- of grief and glory and the pretence of military significance- and without her it's falling away, dissolving- along with the rest of the glassy fantasy she and her courtiers, apologists and celebrants had spun out from her peculiarly limited, 1930s, country house vision of the world. The whole thing has gone "pop" like a bubble. But in slow motion. Like a bubble-gum bubble that goes ragged and waves its retracting flanks around before plastering the face with debris...
This always happens when a monarch dies.
The new monarch is such a very different proposition. He is bluff and ruddy. He wears tweed. He shakes hands. He hugs kids. He gets eggs thrown at him.
One of his first acts- not greatly publicised- was to begin selling off his mother's racehorses...