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The body of the Realm

This article is published in number 16 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until April 19, 2022

October 2021. I am in line at Sainsbury’s. The cashier, a middle-aged Indian woman, wearily drags the products onto the reader and comments on the Queen’s hospitalization with the customer in front of me, an elderly English woman. “When she leaves, having another ruler will be a shock. Look around, everyone in this shop has only seen you on the throne. We will miss you physically. ” The old lady, I would say in her seventies, nods. “Since I was a child, she is the only queen I have had.”

Fortunately, the hospitalization lasted only one day, but enough to make me think that I had never considered it from this point of view. The physical lack of the queen, the physical lack of a body that no one can touch (one does not shake hands with the queen), but in front of which, by protocol, one can only bow. Because Elizabeth II, with her almost 96 years, whose 70 years on the throne are now celebrated, is more than an icon and an institution for all the people who were born and raised under her reignpractically everyone who is shopping with me, and the vast majority of British citizens, who were born after she took the throne of St George.

The Queen’s famous radio message from South Africa on her 21st birthday.

Topical Press Agency

Sainsbury’s cashier is right. It is the body of the queen who will one day be missing, even for those who – as surely as the cashier herself and the elderly lady at the cashier – have never met her in person, but she has felt her presence throughout her life.

She has always been there. Precisely physically, and not only through its own image, reproduced in millions of copies – from banknotes to stamps, from the trinkets of tourist merchandising to the mugs on the Portobello market stalls – so powerful because despite everything it managed not to be inflated.

The queen’s body, as a charismatic figure, has always remained the same. During these 70 years of her reign, Elizabeth has grown old, her back has curved, her figure has become smaller and wobbly, but basically it has never changed. She was already old when she was young, and she was young when she was old. She recently turned down the magazine’s Character of the Year award The Oldie, motivating that one is as old as one feels. And she clearly did not feel old and perhaps she never even felt young when she found herself walking the stage, she who was supposed to be a second-rate royal figure and who was not destined to become queen.

Source: Vanity Fair

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