Just imagine Charles and Camilla huddled in front of an electric heater!
HER face is on our stamps, her head is on our currency, her status as leader of the country has been inviolate for 65 years. Yet what do we really know about the Queen? does she like pink, does she wear fluffy slippers, is she ever tempted to tell Prince William to zip it?
So much about HM remains an enigma, but every now and again the velvet curtain is lifted to give a peek behind the scenes inside the royal residences.
and every time it happens, I love the Queen a little bit more.
She is just not what one might expect from one’s monarch.
Instead, like any 91-year old greatgrandmother who has spent a lifetime in service, she seems to prefer ease over luxury, home comforts over home improvements.
over the years I have come to love her omnipresent indoor handbag, her unchanging shampoo-and-set, but most of all her taste in interior decoration, a style that could be called Regal Frugal, with hints of Shabby Palace Chic.
We’ve seen her breakfast room at Buckingham Palace, with its Tupperware tubs of cereal and Roberts radio plonked next to the newspapers.
We’ve seen her sitting room at Balmoral Castle, with its fireside chairs and curtains covered in thistle print fabric (love) and little gingham day-beds for her doggies (more love).
now we go through the keyhole once more at Balmoral, this time to the castle’s library. Who lives in a house like this? This week, a photograph was issued of the Queen showing Julie Payette, the governor-general of Canada, around the bookshelves of the ol’ McHomestead.
Comparing it with an official Silver Jubilee snap taken in the library in 1977, we can deduce that very little has changed since then, and that the royal budget remains on the strangled side of tight.
as usual, evidence abounds of the Queen’s admirable thrift and lack of interest in her surroundings, as evinced by the hideous green-on-green colour scheme. Ugh. It’s the kind of couldn’t-care-less décor you might have found in the waiting room of a failing dental practice in post-war Taunton.
THE room still has the same brown furniture and the same books on the same shelves as it did back then — but even the Queen has to refresh. The armchairs and sofa have been relieved of their British Regiments fabric and re-covered in Frog Sick Green which clashes horribly with the Teletubby dipsy Green of the carpet.
Meanwhile, the Queen herself is upholstered in the trusty kilt and venerable cardigan she has worn for at least a decade during her Highland holidays.
on an occasional table sits a miserablist arrangement of flowers, like something you might find on the window sill of a funeral home.
Knicknacks? of course, Ma’am. From the fridge-sized clock on the mantelpiece, the athletic figurine lampshades, the ship in a bottle to the statue of a man rescuing a child or a seal pup — it’s difficult to say — the only thing that they have in common is their plug-ugliness.
Surely this is a job-lot of unloved presents from Commonwealth worthies, decanted into this forgotten room with its unread books and chairs with their backs to the large television?
I don’t even believe the Queen ever sits in those chairs, because once she climbed aboard in her tiny buckled shoes, she’d never get back out again. not without a footman and a hoist, at any rate.
That is before we even get to the cheap convector fire stuffed into the fine marble fireplace, exactly like the one she has in her sitting room. not to mention the balding hearth rug, the box-pleat valances on the sofa and the sawn-off television table.
dearie me, it really is all so adorably dreary.
Yet that is what is so impressive about Her Maj — that lack of ostentation and grandeur, combined with the absence of any need to impress.
However, I don’t imagine any other members of the Royal Family live like this.
Hard to imagine Charles and Camilla huddled in front of an electric heater amid Highgrove’s seven-star luxury. and pictures of William and Kate’s £4.5million Kensington Palace refurb revealed soft lamps, scented candles, thick, pale carpets and the kind of plush vibes of the neutral, countryhouse luxe that the duchess is known to covet — and spent more than £1.5 million trying to recreate at their anmer Hall retreat in norfolk.
MEANWHILE, up in her beloved Balmoral, life goes on for the Queen much as it has done for decades. The draughty old castle still has pre-Seventies plugpoints and appliances with those leads of twisted cord.
There is a general air of makedo-and-mend, of everything scrubbed to within an inch of its life.
The Queen updates her furnishings by using the fabric from an old sofa to cover some cushions, and she is good to go for another decade at least.
and when she does go, Regal Frugal will die out with her. You can count on that.