The Boss's Birthday

You can argue that Her Madge is Chairman of the Board of the Church of England and we are all being thoroughly encouraged to use her 90th birthday, spread, as royal birthdays are, throughout the convenient Spring and Summer months, as a means of talking about her faith. You can see the point of this: there are few other heads of state who are so sincerely and publicly Christian as the Queen is, and there have indeed been occasions when her own personal faith has poked through the official Anglican carapace of the Monarchy into clear view. The book you see illustrated here, The Servant Queen and the King She Serves, was produced by the Scripture Union as part of that effort, and we were all sent copies by the diocese. 

It is, let it be said, a game attempt to direct attention to the links between the Queen's work and her personal beliefs. In a way the slimmed-down version for schools is an improvement on the full one as it describes more clearly the liturgy and symbolism of the Coronation service that meant so much to the Queen and has shaped her life subsequently. I am toying with the idea of doing something here in Swanvale Halt that looks more directly at that liturgy, and its connections with the apparently humbler, but spiritually just as grand, liturgies which the rest of us take part in - baptism, matrimony, ordination.

As I say, a game attempt. But one which almost inevitably, no matter how decorated it may be in funny stories about Tommy Cooper and Saudi princes, can't avoid the reverent sycophancy which the subject-matter demands (again, the schools version is a bit better in this respect). Probably the most grating declaration in the book comes when we are shown a windswept monarch stomping along a beach with four corgis: 'She employs 1200 people', the caption tells us, 'but feeds her own dogs'. Well, bona. I can't help reflecting that a couple of dozen generations ago her ancestors would have been feeding their employees to the dogs, but then part of the genius of the British establishment has always been to ignore actual history while constantly banging on about how important it is. As somebody who is neither a republican nor a monarchist (my King sleeps in Leicester), I also can't help the feeling that concentrating on the personal faith and humility of this individual monarch diverts attention from the nature of the institution of monarchy, and I would quite like people to think about that as well. 

We discussed at the Staff Meeting what we should do to respond to the diocese's call to mark the Queen's birthday and use it as a means of talking about the faith. The meeting has a general leftish bias and there was a bit of reluctance evident, but we thought that perhaps we could get something for the garden around the church and use that a means of celebrating the event, which is rather like many communities marked the Jubilee a couple of years ago. However the chap who manages the garden is a definite republican and told me 'the obvious thing would be a plastic corgi', which was entirely unhelpful.

Interestingly I had lunch yesterday with a friend who is (partly) an employee of the Queen - even more directly than I am - and he said they'd been told not to celebrate the event with anything more than tea and cake as it was 'not an achievement'. I wonder whether this represents the opinion of Her Madge herself?