I left the country on 5 September feeling quite pleased to be missing the beatification of Liz Truss. However, that was not all I missed out on. There was, of course, the end of the reign of Elizabeth II and the immediate arrival of Charles III – the speed with which the royal machine worked was quite dazzling.

Whatever happened to all that chatter about skipping a generation? It was never going to happen because it would have made a nonsense of hereditary monarchy, unless Charles III had ended up in the Tower of London never to be seen again. The point is that being on the outside looking in is an interesting place to be – one is never alone in the age of the smart phone.

On Facebook were countless otherwise apparently sane friends delighting in having spent 15 or more hours trudging in that queue, all the sort of people who would throw a wobbler if they were held up for 10 minutes in a queue at a supermarket checkout. They were having the experience of their lives.

I did get to see the full panoply of the funeral procession, although I did stop watching when it came to the actual service, having by that time had my fill of Bruritania. Now that we are well into the rule of Prime Minister Truss, the chances are when the coronation comes round next year it will be Brokitania.

One thing people kept saying was how strange it was to have a King as all they had known was a Queen. Well, I am old enough to have known a King, being brought up in the days when the National Anthem at the end of an evening cinema show could clear the place quicker than you could say snap.

I also remember the day the King died because we were told some time after lunch that school was being suspended as a mark of respect and we could all go home. That was easy enough to do should your home be in Lanark but if you relied on a school bus or train to get home, and lots of us did, there was time to fill. Class Five A – faced with no lessons – decanted to the gym where there was a piano and had a party to celebrate the event. It got quite rowdy until the headmaster, AD Robertson, a most formidable person, appeared: 'Maybe it is time you all went home,' he said. So we did.

Truth to tell we did not care one way or the other about the royal death and while I remember the party and our exit, I have no recollection at all of the funeral that followed. It was a time when television did not dominate everything – people's memories of the past now are often memories of what they have seen on television, their smart phone or some website or podcast.

The other thing is that he actually did not rebuke us for our behaviour: the twitter storm today would be tremendous.

Bill Russell



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