We should admire the Queen’s bond with creatures great and small
In a clip shown as part of the Derby coverage, the Queen was seen visiting the Royal Stud at Sandringham. Studying a mare and her foal with a knowledgeable and affectionate eye, Her Majesty mused, “I often wonder what goes through her head.”
It is a thought that many of her subjects have had about the Queen herself. That brief clip, and the equally fascinating documentary compiled from the Royal family’s home movies, offered some telling insights.
We know, for example, that at 96 she is still curious about the world and still looking to the future (those foals). We know, from her uproarious tea party with Paddington Bear, the highlight of Saturday’s Platinum Party at the Palace, that she is fearlessly willing to take on new challenges.
And although the Queen’s love of animals – dogs and horses in particular – is well known, we now understand something remarkable about the quality of her relationship with them.
A fondness for animals is supposed to be a distinctive British trait. It is also a trait often claimed by celebrities and politicians, who perhaps see a pet as an indicator of a trustworthy personality.
But too often, instead of wondering, like the Queen, what our companion animals are feeling, we tend to anthropomorphise them, projecting on to them our own complicated feelings, and in the process, illtreating them.
A Robin Red breast in a Cage/puts all Heaven in a Rage, wrote William Blake in his furious poem, “Auguries of Innocence”. So, too, the wretched toy dog tricked out in frills and furbelows; so too, the animals hastily acquired for lockdown companionship whose own needs are neglected.
Animals do not judge: they are not awed by majesty nor contemptuous of failure; their trust is both consoling and humbling. Vulnerable themselves, their ability to help the vulnerable is something that the Queen seems instinctively to understand.
In War Doctor, his memoir of volunteering in war zones from Sarajevo to Syria, the surgeon David Nott recalls being invited to lunch at Buckingham Palace.
He was seated next to the Queen, who asked where he had come from. Aleppo, he said, and felt himself about to weep at the horrors he had witnessed there.
The Queen “looked at me quizzically and touched my hand”. Then she took some dog biscuits out of a silver box, and for the rest of the lunch they fed the corgis under the table and chatted about dogs, as Nott felt his distress drain away. “There,” the Queen said. “That’s so much better than talking, isn’t it?”.
The trouble with marmalade sandwiches – as anyone who took them to a Jubilee picnic will have found – is that they are a magnet for wasps.
If we paused to wonder what is going through their tiny vespid minds, it might well be that the human hysteria when they take a nibble of a sandwich is an entertaining side show.
But in her recent book, Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps, Professor Seirian Sumner argues that “The problem with wasps is people.” We should learn to love the stripey blighters, she suggests.
So if a wasp visits your picnic, don’t panic. Just pour the unwanted visitor a saucer of beer, and enjoy your sandwiches in peace while it gets quietly sozzled. read more