I worked last Thursday at the biggest station on my patch. A flagship station. It was a normal shift. I served a few customers, checked my phone. Repeat. At about eleven, I popped over to Asda to get lunch for me and a colleague. I served a few more customers and checked my phone. I looked at a tweet, and then looked at it harder. I looked at the tweet below it. Both had been sent within the last minute.
I wish I’d kept the tweet. It just said that something big must have happened. A Tory had passed a note to the Labour deputy PM. Truss was being urgently briefed. Everyone looked shocked. I turned to my colleague and said, ‘I think the Queen has died’. Then I checked the news. And I told my colleague that maybe I was wrong. It was just a guess. A hunch. There was no mention of it on the news sites. The Queen was rehabilitated.
Then there was news, just minutes later. She was ‘under medical supervision’. I put the live news on my iPad to keep up. A while later, it was pointed out that the TV presenters had all changed into black tie. They knew. ‘I think the Queen has died’, I told my colleague. ‘Again?’, she asked. It seemed ghoulish to speculate, so I changed my mind. Again. She’s ‘under medical supervision’. In my mind, I envisaged a doctor with his fingers on her wrist listening to her pulse, ready to say when.
At about six o’clock, Huw made it official. A logo appeared. There was some awkward – dare I say amateurish – shuffling of papers, and an audible gulp. The Queen had died. For the third time that afternoon. In hindsight, my very first pronouncement of her death, some hours earlier, was probably right.
Otherwise, it was a very ordinary day on the railway. A momentous day, yes. A notable occasion, of course. But it hardly had the shock factor of 9/11 or Diana. Life went on.
The Mexile 
So you are the new harbinger of death then are you? It’s just an observation, you saw a murder of crows gathering and donning their black ties and then one and one came to three!
It was only a matter of time really and not unexpected. There will be the Royal send off of course with the usual suspects flying in from all over to pay homage, canons will be fired and the usual pomp and ceremony will be on display. TV stations will have a field day with advertisers paying a premium.
Then perhaps this time next year Charlie will will get his crowning glory and Camilla her tiara and all will be well in Camelot again. The Firm will continue unabated, the mint will produce a likeness of his lordship facing east on new coins and paper goods and a new Elizabeth Regina album celebrating seventy years of havoc will be promoted everywhere in glorious technicolor.. coming to a station near you.
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If only I possessed the power to see into the future. Although I’d make good use of it by checking out lottery results rather than royal deaths. It was a good guess though, as it turned out. But the tweet I read really did suggest something of an extraordinary nature. Two things popped into mind. A nuclear attack on Ukraine. And the death of the queen. Both topics had been in the news.
The queen had been photographed greeting Liz Truss just two days earlier. Some had described her as looking ‘robust and lively’. I’d have chosen three different words to describe what I saw. ‘Close’, ‘to’ and ‘death’.
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