‘We all thought it was strange,’ my Dad told me,
recounting his family’s response to the Queen’s 1977 Silver Jubilee after
recently immigrating to the UK from Ireland. The erection of trestle tables in
the streets, stringing up of bunting and feverish flag-waving – all to
celebrate a remote woman born into vast wealth and privilege whom few would
ever meet – must have intensified the experience of living in a foreign
country. Strangely, my Dad’s experience has become my own: during the
celebrations of the Diamond Jubilee this weekend, the country in which I was
born and live will seem to become someone else’s.
This happened last year, on the day of the Royal
Wedding. I was finishing up my final year at Falmouth, a largely arts and
humanities-based (and, as such, left-leaning) university. ‘Who’s going to turn up to
that?’ I thought, of a party organized on Marlborough Road, a street with a
high student population. I stayed in. Throughout the day friends popped back to
the house for something, merry with sun and Pimm’s, telling me the party was
really good and not even about William and Kate, really, just a good excuse to
get drunk. But that night, as I watched YouTube
footage of a mass, pissed rendition of ‘God Save The Queen’ in a street
packed to capacity with students, I unexpectedly found myself in a minority
within my own generation.
