Congratulations Ma’am

 
The queen today passes into myth. Rip up your history books, for new stats are at the printers today. There’s not going to be much in the news today, about the queen, so I thought I’d better set the record straight and send into the ether some unabashed, hagiographical facts. Sixty-three years. Enough to make us lesser mortals blush with shame at our own pitiful contribution to humanity’s story. Sixty-three years. Brilliant. She is eighty-nine. I mean, my mum is nearly eighty-nine, but let’s be honest, she HASN’T HAD TO BE QUEEN. Sixty-three years on the throne. I for one am so humbled by this achievement that I might cut off my own head. Let’s set those numbers in some kind of context, shall we? Elizabeth became “The Second” in 1953, following the death of her father, Colin Firth. HER FATHER DIED. How many people, honestly, can say that he or she has had a parent, die? Nobody. But Elizabeth not only had a father die, but carried on living. Brilliant. Sixty-three years. Her triumphs are innumerable, but foremost amongst them is surely this: in SIXTY THREE YEARS, she has not died. Not once. Sustained only by the finest food, accommodation, luxury, health-care, enormous wealth, a part-time job, servants, lackeys, money from the state and a life utterly devoid of threat or stress, she hath endured. And boy, hath she. Through the turbulent Fifties, the so-called Sixties, the turbulent Seventies, the Eighties (turbulent), the tragic Nineties, the turbulent Noughties, and all the other decades up to the present one – some of ’em turbulent – she has kept alive, steering with her inscrutable hand the oil-tanker of State through a sea of troubled metaphors and avoiding rocks. Who does not love her more than his own eyes? What bastard would not cut his fingers off or slice his children up into chips, if it would spare one hair on this monarch’s godlike head? She’s brilliant. Funny, too. Who hath not marveled at her wit and warmth? What strutting foreign despot, what snarling republican, or sneering, jealous leveller hath not been bent low by her charisma and charm? She shines like a diamond. She gives. Selfless. She makes St Francis of Assisi look like a fucking loan-shark. Every speech: one hundred percent. Never wears the same dress twice. Had children. What other alleged leader can with her compare? You can keep your grinning humility of yer Dalai Lama, your loin-cloth’d veggie sneakiness of Mahatma, yer deliberate populism of Mandela, they are but transient pieces of poo, which Time will flush away, leaving still the ever-gleaming porcelain which is OUR QUEEN. And let’s not forget this: she hasn’t died. Sixty-three years. And, she hath single-handedly brought the British monarchy bang up to date: when she came to the throne it was 1953. Now, it’s 2015. She did that. Brilliant. And she’s hot. I’d give her one. The Duke of Edinburgh is a lucky man. That’s why you’d never catch him up Soho, keeping a string of whores with posh mates all vetted by MI6. Syrian Orphans can fuck off: the queen is the toast today and I invite you to charge your glasses all, and drink as much as you can of whatever you can afford.

Chris Larner