On the day the Queen died, I laughed. A hard-bellied laugh. With tears even. Before you shout ‘Treason!’, let me explain. I had tickets booked for a Soho Theatre double bill — first to see drag queen, comedian and friend Amrou Al-Kadhi aka Glamrou, and after to see Stewart Lee’s Work in Progress, at the behest of my partner, a Lee fanatic. It was going to be a droll evening gallivanting around town. I’d bothered to apply mascara. I planned to have half a pint of shandy because the baby inside me is hopefully well-baked. Keeping abreast of the rolling news, I gingerly ventured into town to an event at Selfridges. As I got off the bus at precisely 18.34, my phone pinged. The Queen had died. I looked up to check other faces. Nobody else seemed to be as alert. I’m seemingly enslaved to looking at Apple News alerts. When I entered the store, brows were furrowing at their phones but shopping for the new season was still propelling them forward.
Ten minutes later, after checking out cool boutique Machine-A’s pop-up, the DJ asked, ‘What? We can’t have any music?’ He was perplexed. Then the whole store went silent. Still, the shoppers shopped. It was only the next day that the store fully closed as a mark of respect.
