Battered but unbowed
“And what era are we in now, do you suppose, the frighteningly modern?”
– Queen Elizabeth, season three, The Crown.
In 1964, Her Majesty couldn’t have foreseen how frighteningly modern – and bewilderingly postmodern – things would become half a century later. Her middle son broadcasting outlandish disclaimers – “There’s a slight problem with the sweating” – and tweeting about his “ill-judged” association with Jeffrey Epstein; her own high-rating life and times playing out on Netflix as if one was tearing up the time and space continuum in a wonky Windsor Tardis…
2019: what a time to be alive. Brexit, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson – it’s like a television social experiment to see if toddlers can run the world. Children at the US/Mexico border in cages, anti-Semitism as a defining election issue in the UK, the planet burning … You couldn’t switch on without doing a Greta
