We Interrupt This Programme

'I quite liked the man until about three hours ago, but now I don't mind if I never hear about him again', my mother told me about 6pm yesterday, 'and I'll be very annoyed if they don't show the final of Masterchef', which of course they didn't. She is not the only person I have heard about making the same comment regarding the return of normal TV service, and I have to say when Radio 4 broadcast an old episode of Great Lives yesterday evening and it turned out to be about Mary Anning (a clever gay girl in a peak bonnet picking fossils! It doesn't get better than that. OK, well, she may not have been gay) I almost cheered. I don't dislike the late Duke of Edinburgh particularly but it was a huge relief to hear about someone different after six hours of the same thing over and over again.

Meanwhile the Establishment (including, I strongly get the impression, a lot of clergy) is hugely enjoying itself with protocol and speaking-for-the-nation stuff, and normally sensible souls can be found saying daft things. 'I always wondered', said Simon Schama on the wireless, 'why he volunteered to join this establishment and sacrifice so much. It was, I think, because he thought so much of Britain'. The great historian didn't seem to believe - and nobody else on the programme corrected him* - that it might have had something to do with the fact that young Lt Philip Mountbatten had fallen in love with the heir to the British throne and thus accepted what came with it. But I wonder whether the British people is not quite where the Establishment thinks it is. I rather suspect the British people doesn't regard the death of Prince Philip as the epoch-making event that it is supposed to, certainly not worth postponing the final of Masterchef for. In Swanvale Halt, I have heard absolutely nothing about it at the Co-Op or the café. The Diocese advised churches to have lots of spare candles available, but here, Rick the verger, who commemorates the death of anyone famous, printed off a set of Wikipedia pages about HRH and sat in the church all day, and the only person who came in to light candles was Selina. She always lights candles for her relatives but is increasingly unclear whether they are alive or dead, and certainly doesn't really know which day it is. It isn't indifference, as I think people definitely care about the situation the Queen is left in, thinking, surely, of their own bereavements; it isn't hostility. It's simply not regarding the Forth Bridge event as that much more important, say, than the death of Albert down the road who didn't quite make it to 100 and who they spoke to a couple of times and wasn't he a character. 

The Diocese has suggested we change the altar hangings to purple, which we are not doing: as my friend Cara in Emwood put it, 'the last time I looked, Jesus was still alive'. Instead our republican mayor and her republican husband our senior churchwarden will come to church and she will read a short Bible passage and light a candle while Rick will toll the bell and I will attempt to record the scene for posterity. I wasn't really a republican at midday yesterday but now I think I probably am, too.

London Bridge will of course be a different scale of event, even I will concede that. It really will mark the passage of an epoch. But even then, I wonder whether the national mood will really be grief, as the Establishment will imagine, rather than a stoic awareness of time sweeping all its sons (and daughters, and those who identify as neither) away, a sense that from that point on we will have to conceive of ourselves differently. They will misread things, as a way of imagining that they matter more than they do.

(* But said show did furnish one wonderful quote from a journalist who stated 'I have refused to watch The Crown on the grounds that I am still upset at Matt Smith leaving Dr Who')