Thank you to the Queen

What a woman. Plus, I broke up with someone this week - and took heart from Gwyneth Paltrow.

Photo by Samuel Regan-Asante on Unsplash

Hello, and thank you for reading The Honesty Box.

What a woman Queen Elizabeth II was. Echoing the words of her son King Charles III, I would like to say thank you to her, for serving this country for so long, for always doing so from the point of view of love and for ‘showing up,’ in person - physically and emotionally - at so many occasions.

I caught glimpses of the Queen a few times. Once, when she visited my university, Birmingham, for its centenary celebrations in 2000; the second on her diamond jubilee in 2012, where I crammed into a crowd by the Tower of London while she and her family braved the rain and cold on a river pageant, and a third time when I went to see the royal family walk to church on Christmas Day from her Norfolk residence Sandringham, where I caught sight of her as she was driven home in a maroon Bentley that complemented the pink trim of her coat.

It was 2018, and the last time the Queen would go to the Christmas service with William, Kate, Harry and Meghan all in attendance.

The ‘fab four,’ as they were then referred to by the press, strode along the path to the church together, crowds respectfully calling out ‘Merry Christmas’. (The following year, Harry and Meghan spent Christmas in California, before they moved there.)

The Queen on her way to her home in Sandringham, on Christmas Day 2018

That Christmas I had resisted the trip, feeling it was somehow ‘naff’ to try to spot the royal family, but it was fun, friendly and a real show, put on for the public and taken seriously by the Queen.

After a fairly long queue, a bag search and a short wait, I walked with my mother across a green outside the church to stand with others next to the path. Soon, the family started arriving - Prince Charles (as he was then) first, followed by his children and their wives - and hymn sheets were handed out as they went into the church so the crowd could follow along with the service.

It was exciting, and I was star struck, but seeing the Queen was something I am glad I did. She was a constant in my life, and while she rarely spoke publicly, I felt she had the nation’s back. ‘We will meet again,’ her words during the Covid lockdown of 2020, were a huge reassurance.

Some of us have been shaken into consciousness of her life by her death.

But that constant presence is one I think many of didn’t really question. ‘Look, she’s back,’ said my younger nephew, who is nearly three, when he saw a photo of the Queen on the front page of a newspaper on Friday.

He’d probably never heard of the Queen until she died, and his sudden awareness of her seems to reflect how some of us have been shaken into consciousness of her life by her death.

So many conversations I’ve had about the Queen’s death start with ‘I’m not a royalist but…’ and I think that shows how much she was there in our minds, but that we took her for granted and during her lifetime many people didn’t think they had strong feelings about her either way.

Now she’s died, she’s ‘back’ in our minds and many people will learn things about her they didn’t know, will scrabble for snippets about what she was really like (we’ll never truly know), and might understand more about her role and how she balanced tradition with modernity.

Yesterday, my sister asked my nephews who our new king is. ‘Liz Truss,’ said the older one (aged five). In a week where so much has happened, and there is still so much to unfold, I think we can understand his confusion.

It will take a while for everything that is happening to sink in and for us to understand what the Queen really meant to us. But for now I am grateful. Thank you, ma’am.

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Breaking up is hard to do

On to my breakup, which happened last weekend, inspired by Gwyneth Paltrow (kind of), because it turns out we have so much in common.

Gwyneth and I have both ‘consciously uncoupled’ (her from her marriage to Chris Martin, me from a six-month relationship), we both have blonde highlights though sometimes don’t cover up our greying roots (she made an ‘empowering beauty choice’ by showing her natural hair at the Golden Globes in 2020; I can’t afford the hairdresser), and we both have children named after fruit and biblical characters. (OK, that’s a lie. Gwyneth has kids called Apple and Moses; I don’t have offspring.)

The reason I’ve been thinking about Gwyneth is because she turns 50 later this month, two days before I turn 45 (ooh another thing we have in common – we’re both Librans), and in an interview with the Financial Times last weekend, she was asked for her advice to those feeling less than confident about life.

“Abundance and longevity and happiness follows ruthless loyalty to yourself” Gwyneth Paltrow

She had some sage advice: “The most critical thing is to be ruthlessly honest with yourself,” she told Jo Ellison. “Honest about what you’re sublimating, what you’re white-knuckling your way through, honest about what’s not working for you,” she said, and that might mean leaving a relationship or job, she added.

Gwyneth said that people avoid this ruthless honesty because it can “upset the apple cart”. But, she said: “Abundance and longevity and happiness follows ruthless loyalty to yourself.”

I read this interview during a pause in the 24-hour crying session I was in the middle of last weekend, after said breakup.

It was one of those times when the tears are uncontrollable, and you don’t even try to stop them. You don’t care what you look like, on the London Overground on the way to carrying out the breakup, sitting opposite a row of 6 people, or even when you bump into a primary school friend you haven’t seen in years - and you just bawl through a polite hello, without apology.

I’m grateful to my tears for telling me what I needed to do, but I would like to have been brave enough to say something sooner

I thought about Gwyneth and how people ridiculed her for using the phrase ‘conscious uncoupling’ as I washed up a saucepan on Sunday, tears dripping off my face into the tepid water, the day after my breakup.

My split was definitely an uncoupling, and I did consciously think about it for a while before it happened. But it took my body, not my mind, to get me to be brave enough to actually go through with it.

The unstoppable crying started when I texted a friend to say I wouldn’t be going to a barbecue as I was meeting ‘the boy,’ and he replied saying something about the barbecue host’s mates being there, and I got FOMO as I thought I might be missing out on meeting The One.

If I’m thinking about wanting to meet someone else, I thought, the man I’m with isn’t for me, and that’s when the face tap started pouring.

Six months isn’t that long to be with a partner, but it’s long enough to feel close to someone, to start to love their familiar smell, to become fond of the shiny t-shirt and shorts they wear to bed, to find their delight in trains and planes endearing or to enjoy it when they gently take the mickey out of your fear of plants with big leaves.

It’s long enough to have memories that only you and he will ever know about, moments in time to cherish.

I feared that he’d compartmentalised me from the rest of his life

It’s long enough to get attached, in other words, and that makes it hard to be ruthlessly honest and face the fact that this relationship is fine for now, but does it align with who you really are, with what you really want?

Anyway, I’m grateful to my tears for telling me what I needed to do, but I would like to have been brave enough to say what it is that I really wanted and needed earlier on.

So, when I wanted to ask my ex whether he’d like to meet my friends, I would actually say something like: I would love you to meet a few of my friends – would you come to the Mexican night at my co-working space this weekend?

Instead, I feared that he’d compartmentalised me from the rest of his life and there was no point in asking because the answer would be no, which is what I didn’t want to face up to.

I came to the realisation that I needed more and felt I was ready for us to get more interested in each other’s lives, which (while he was lovely in a lot of ways) was more than he was willing to do. Sure, I probably made some assumptions about what was going on for him, but I was too scared to ask direct questions. What I do know is that my heart said the relationship wasn’t right for me.

“I need more than you can give right now,” I said through my tears.

A few years after Gwyneth and Chris’s conscious uncoupling, she wrote a piece for Vogue about how she realised the marriage was over. “I knew it. It was in my bones,” she writes of that realisation, which she had during a birthday weekend in Tuscany.

“At first, I was moderately successful at turning the volume down on that knowledge. It would be years until we said the words aloud. But, that weekend, a dam had cracked just enough to hear the unrelenting trickle of truth. And it grew louder until it was all I could hear.” (Probably worse for Gwyneth than it was for me, but there’s another thing we have in common.)

It only took me weeks for me to express my trickle of truth, as I did last weekend, on a bench facing one of the ponds on Hampstead Heath, sitting arm in arm with him. “I need more than you can give right now,” I said through my tears. I’m sad, but I know it’s the right thing.

Things I like

Clubbing for people who like sleep

Annie Mac DJ-ing at Before Midnight. This was at about 8.45 pm

On Friday, I went dancing at Before Midnight, Annie Mac’s club night at new venue Here, in central London - and flipping LOVED it. It starts early and ends at midnight, so it’s made for grown-ups who want to have an amazing time and get the last Tube home, and for three and a half hours I, and about 2,000 others, danced our socks off to house and disco.

Annie mixed Ultra Nate’s Free into Beyonce’s Break My Soul and then Madonna’s Vogue, and I ran to the front when she played Stevie Wonder’s Do I Do and jumped in the air to a dance mix of Donna Summer’s State of Independence.

Todd Terry’s Jumpin’ (from 1994) reminded me of my self-conscious teen clubbing days wearing heels and a push-up bra, so it was wonderful, aged 44, to be in trainers, jeans, and no bra, hands in the air, with not a care in the world. Oh and the venue, Here, is pretty awesome - massive disco ball, nice staff, amazing light and sound system, free cloakroom. Great times.