Last weekend my eldest daughter, Grace, returned from a trip to Northern Ireland for 10 days where she spent time with her boyfriend and his family.
Grace is clever, she sees things and she observes and reports.
Her boyfriend, Matthew, took her to Derry and to Belfast and there she saw the peace walls and the peace gates and the murals on the walls drawn by the different sides of the divide and she began to get a deeper understanding of what happened in Northern Ireland in the late 1960’s and early 70’s, some of which continues to happen today.
She came back and told me some of the things that she’d seen and was somewhat incredulous at the level of sectarian bigotry that she was exposed to in Northern Ireland having never noticed anything like that before.
Grace comes from a world (in England) where the bigotry comes in different forms but it’s all still bigotry.
And so, I explained to Grace something of what it was like to have been brought up in the west of Scotland where the sectarian bigotry was and still is fierce in some places.
I explained what it was like to be brought up as the son of a protestant Father and a catholic Mother in that environment and what it felt like to get my nose broken on two occasions for being a ‘catholic’ and then being told, in the early part of my career, that my aspirations would be better served somewhere else where people didn’t realise ‘what school I’d gone to’.
I tell you this tale because people who were brought up as Catholics in my part of Scotland in the 1980’s were no friends to the royal family.
Our bigoted and conditioned biases were pointed towards the republican movement in Northern Ireland and against the union and the British (even though we were in fact British) and so try as I might I’ve never been a flag waving, bunting hanging, ardent supporter of the Windsor’s.
Imagine my surprise at the deep sadness I felt and the huge degree of respect and admiration that washed over me after the death of the queen and the things that were written about her and continue to be so.
I have realised, since last Thursday, what a wise and self-sacrificing individual that we’ve lost to this country.
Someone who learned French so that she could reach out to England’s old enemy who then wrote beautiful things about her in their national press after she died.
Someone who reached out (very early in her time as queen) to the Japanese after our allies dropped nuclear bombs on their cities.
She was loved and respected and admired in so many places around the world because of how she went about her business.
She never had to work until she was 96 but she did.
She was softly spoken with a general strategy and she was persistent and resilient and the example that she set with regards to duty was something quite extraordinary.
It’s unlikely that I will forget the way that she sat alone in a cathedral at her husband’s funeral.
And so, thinking about all of this, I think perhaps we should all try to be a little bit more of a ‘monarch in our own country’.
The catholic with the republic insentient turned into the atheist with no political allegiance and so, he read Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy where he learned that heaven exists in exactly where you decide that it exists.
I am the monarch in my own heaven and so perhaps I should try to aspire, in some tiny form, to show the duty and diligence and attention that she showed to her kingdom.
Blog Post Number - 3205