My brother, the one who was the Scottish soldier in my previous post about the Queen – Elizabeth the Great as she is sometimes being called now – suggested that we might need our heads examined when he phoned me tonight from the Netherlands and I told him that we had been in the queue to get into Saint Giles’s to pay respects to the Queen. But it seemed like the right thing to do, although it’s something I would never have imagined I would have done. But that brief glimpse we got of the hearse when we were on the motorway bridge near Kinross as she travelled down from Aberdeenshire to Edinburgh didn’t seem like enough.
We knew that we wouldn’t be allowed to take any photos in the cathedral and I must admit that when it said on the radio news that the queues were so long we might have to shuffle along for as much as seven hours before getting into the catherdral, I assumed that would be an exaggeration, it was slightly, it turned out we were in the queue for five hours. Luckily it was a dry night, otherwise we would have given up I think. We weren’t alone, thirty-three thousand other people felt the need too. The photo below shows a small part of the queue snaking though the Meadows in Edinburgh. We were about an hour in by that point.
It was 3.30 am before we got in there for our four minutes or so, but it was certainly an experience, there was nobody in tears, it was just very dignified and serene. But still, as we left, I couldn’t stop myself from looking back a few times, it still seemed unreal.
This photo from the television coverage was taken before we left for St Giles’s.
