I was conscious that I had brought turmoil to the Royal Drawing
Room with my incendiary high heels and hand-whirled fei-huo, my
hysterical pack animals and rearing moose - fortunately Louise
remained external to the events within, though my last memory as
acting monarch was of her snatching the circumpolar star Mirfaq
between her jaws and apparently gobbling it down. Louise and
Mirfaq, perhaps that is where the engineers, my engineers, hailed
from. A mere 510 light years distant, as the Mark VI immediately
informed me, but what need would such technically advanced
creatures have of planets and goldilocks zones? Surely they could
live anywhere without recourse to the amiable post-Pleistocene
terrestrial conditions that prevailed, until as recently as a few hours
ago, around me? And why Mirfaq, I had to ask myself. Was Louise
trying to say something? Was I, with my alarming interface with the
family members, protesting at the inevitability of fate, of a culture that
depends on inheritance for its virtues? One can never be sure even
of one's own motives, for while as monarch I could not deny a certain
inherent attachment to the hereditary principle, as an individual I
longed for something that I believe persons who shop in
supermarkets call "self fulfilment" (incidentally I have to add how
much my attraction to supermarkets grew the further I was distanced
from them and it's a point worthy of note: in every hereditary monarch
there lives a being who longs to stack supermarket shelves. I can
testify to the overwhelming power and attraction of ordinariness that
can overcome the celebrity-inflicted in just the same way that the
obscurity-disadvantaged may long to open Parliament or launch a
ship or spend an inordinate amount of state revenue on trivia. You
can always identify the parvenu - a real queen would rather be a hat
check girl.) And it came as relieving calmant, as soothing in its way
as a coffee enema, to learn that the prototype of the Mark series, the
original and surely the only genuine heir to the triple throne, had for
many years being following a worthwhile and industrious course as a
cataloguer, restorer and recorder of monumental brasses. Modestly
based in the village called the Lizard, she would sortie out on an
impossibly antiquated bicycle to examine her local charges, while for
further flung examples of medieval latten work, she would make use
of a converted postal van into which her metal and rubber steed could
just be squeezed alongside her batterie of detergents, screwdrivers
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