It’s just sad, when you have grown up with someone, on the television, on the news, on postage stamps. Someone who you didn’t really know but kind of did. Because when you see someone’s face for long enough you kind of know them. It’s a primate thing. A person who was born, like all of us, into a life she didn’t ask for, who as a symbol represents good or bad things about this country depending if you ask a monarchist or republican, but who always seemed fundamentally human in the role. Tact and Tupperware and TV moments on balconies. I think it is sad because she was as unifying a figure as a monarch could be. A generational bridge. She represented the age of TV I suppose and her coronation was the reason a lot of people bought their first telly in 1952. So our impressions of her are via the TV more than, say, Twitter. A Twitter-era monarch will surely have a tougher time but that is another sad thing, that feeling we are heading into more fragmented and divided and digitised times where nothing at all can or should be agreed on. She was just there through our lives without realising it. My first memory is of riding a red white and blue tricycle for her silver jubilee in 1977 and so it is hard not to be emotional about someone who has been one of the small threads in your existence. She just seemed to be a good example of staying level-headed despite the familial and social chaos around her. Even shortly before her death she seemed to be stoic and dignified and putting the role before her self. And it’s hard not to relate to those times we have had to place duty above self. And she lived her whole life like that by all accounts. And it is just sad because it reminds us of the people we love who we feel like they too are as eternal as a postage stamp but who are, also, as fragile and mortal as humans are. My Nan loved her and she made her happy seeing her on her little old Hitachi telly even when my Nan was dying of cancer. She meant a lot to a lot of people. An era leaves us. Rest in peace.