Part XXV

2 0 0
                                    

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  

With Headscarf and Hasselblad in the GlensWhere stories live. Discover now