How To Be English

Hello Dear Reader

It’s been quite the week, has it not? I don’t know about you, but I am running out of superlatives (and expletives) to describe each month of the last few years. For so long, it seemed as if time pooled slowly, like an endless 3.20 pm waiting for the end of school bell to ring. Now most mornings I check the news wondering what fresh hell awaits. Last month seems aeons ago - and the events of 2020 already like old black and white photos in a well thumbed history book.

If you were to come round my gaff and I was to make you a cup of tea - the milk only going in after, please, none of that milk first savagery round here, thank you - there is a 1 in 2 chance you would be drinking it out of a mug with our erstwhile monarch staring at you. I loved the Queen, absolutely loved her, and my collection of royal mugs would rival that of a Windsor gift shop. I have a royal mug for every occasion, and am especially fond of waving my Charles and Diana Royal Wedding one at my husband as a subtle warning if we’ve been having an argument.

The handle fell off from overuse and it’s now a handy pen holder but by far my favourite is the one of the Queen and her Prime Ministers, which stops at John Major. Maybe someone made a more up-to-date one and I’ve just yet to find it, but I tell myself it’s because nobody needs Tony Blair on a mug, and certainly not Boris Johnson. There is only so much indignity one woman can take and, while we’ll never be certain, having to hang out with Boris and cheese loving Liz in the space of an hour would see off the best of us.

No, I’ve not a clue who any of these dudes are either.

When I was six I sent the Queen a birthday card and received a letter of thanks from one of her ladies-in-waiting. I can remember feeling the weight of the paper and marvelling over the special red frank and seal on the envelope. Not since the year before when my Uncle Mike bought me the Grease soundtrack LP and signed it from John Travolta (the truth only coming to light in 2004 after a particularly charged Christmas family gathering; reader, I cried and I was thirty years old) had anything this momentous in my life happened to me. Even though only that summer had I come downstairs early one morning to discover my parents’ party was still in full swing and Russ Abbott was in the kitchen in a loinskin - which would be excitement enough for any lifetime - my card had been received and a flunky had acknowledged this!

My mother was thrilled for me, my father less so.

Thus, the seeds of my latent republicanism were sown.

But I don’t want to talk about that now, because it is neither the time nor the place and while I am fully aware it is irrational, I was tremendously, passionately fond of the old gal, all my grave concerns about the institution itself notwithstanding.

You might also have read a lot about colonialism in particular this week. What I doubt you will read about is how complicated these feelings are; about how much a certain generation of her subjects in far-flung lands cared for her, even though they too knew it made little sense. What I think a lot of second generation immigrants like myself don’t understand - and can never understand - is how powerful the symbol of the Queen became for those who made journeys over oceans to a strange land that had yet seemed so familiar to them under mango trees or in tin roofed classrooms.

She was England, and England was her.

So if you are not English, how do you become English?

When I was six, I had what I thought was a pretty fool-proof checklist:

• Be blonde and blue eyed

• Have long, straight legs

• Be called Sarah, Kate or Fiona

• Go to Norfolk a lot

• Also go to Scotland a lot

• Own a Labrador

• Speak French badly

• Consider dentistry an unwarranted and expensive vanity, so much so that the dream is to make it impossible to come by on the NHS.

• Understand the shipping forecast

• Love the Queen

The only thing on my checklist I could confidently tick was the last. My mother had found me an orthodontist, and would never go willingly to somewhere cold and call it a holiday and the rest of that list would require extensive plastic surgery and a personality transplant.

I wanted to be English so bad, so I was gonna love the bejesus out of the Queen and hope that did the trick.

We are all of us - no matter our feelings about monarchy - saying goodbye to something more than a woman. It is as if a whole chunk of our bedraggled nation has fallen off into the sea and sunk to the bottom and things will never seem the same again. We know too much about our new monarch to hold him in the same high regard. Because the thing with the Queen was her mystique: she was inscrutable, a living, breathing Mona Lisa who we felt all at once close to and as distant from as could possibly be. She was whatever we projected onto her: a dream of better times, black cabs, London buses, Geri Halliwell in a Union Jack dress, a version of our own grannies in their best bib and tucker - all our jumbled dreams of the country we wished we lived in tumbling out and rearranging themselves into her face.

So when I see the five mile, twenty-four-hour-long queue snaking across London to Westminster Hall, I get it. It is a human elegy doing the most British thing they can think of doing to honour her, hopefully while talking about the weather and casting passive aggressive glances at anyone who dares to push in.

When we were children, we imagined history was something that happened over there in another time. Now we are part of it. But we shall make new histories, better ones, ones that we can look back on with pride rather than ambivalence. It might not feel that way right now, but we’ll figure it out, even if we have to Heath Robinson it.

Goodbye Mrs Windsor.

Now to keep buggering on.

With much love,

Nerina x

P.S. In very English fashion, my sales pitch comes as an addendum. My UK tour starts in Cambridge on October 8th and tickets are available here. My Christmas Extravaganza is happening again after a three year hiatus and tickets are available here. The vinyl version of the new album, I Don’t Know What I’m Doing, will finally be in stock at the beginning of next month - but it is a limited edition and is likely to sell out soon.