Polly Vernon has her say

I DID NOT EXPECT to feel so sad about Prince Philip – did you? Having anticipated his death for a while, as one does that of a 90-something; having felt marginally more connected with him than I did before I watched The Crown (though that isn’t saying much)… I assumed I’d barely notice when it happened. Assumed I had bigger things to think about – things that affected me more directly than the death of a man I’d never met, whose existence encapsulated a bizarre quirk of our national psyche, the merits of which have been questioned for as long as I can remember.

But then he did die. I was alerted to the fact while queueing for Tesco’s selfcheckout by my Instagram feed, and bugger me if I didn’t utter an involuntary, audible: ‘Oh no…’ Bugger me if I didn’t feel the prickle of tears: actual tears, against my actual eyelids. Bugger me if I didn’t experience the unmistakable pinch of loss.

I’m writing this in the build-up to the funeral; you’ll be reading it in the aftermath, and: heavens, our relationship with the royals is complicated, eh? You think you don’t care, then one of them dies, and it turns out you do. You think they don’t matter, shouldn’t matter, can’t… then one of them makes a break for freedom, and your heart aches for the fracturing of his relationship with his brother. You think it’s all too dull for words, then there’s the Oprah interview and you can talk of little else for weeks. You think it’s just ridiculous, really; then try and imagine your country without them, but can’t.

I am neither a royalist nor a republican, just your run-of-the-mill not terribly loyal subject, who has perved (for want of a better word) over the highs and lows and calamities and triumphs of the Windsor clan, for the whole of my life, because… I dunno. Because they’re them – and they’re there?

This ultimately compelling intersection of family life – a fancier, higher stakes, public retelling of the everyday soap operas in which we’re all mired, the jostling for status, the infidelities, the feelings of not being a parent’s favourite, et cetera – and class, the British condition against which we rail, because it’s preposterous! This ranking of each one of us in comparison to the rest, decided by accident of birth! Yet we all comply, anyway.

But when you’re British, you don’t get to opt out of feeling things about the royal family. They’re our pride and our problem, our affliction and our favourite, longestserving celebrities. Queen Elizabeth was widely misattributed the quote, ‘Grief is the price we pay for love,’ in the days that followed the death of her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh. It is, in fact, a contraction of writings by the psychiatrist Dr Colin Murray Parkes. But it’s lovely and it’ll do for us, right now. Philip was ours and he died and we’re sad. Oh! That’s actually not complicated at all.