Fair well Ma’am

After my last post, I gave up on the idea of going to HMQ’s Lying in State.  Instead, I moped around the house like a sulky teenager for a few days, before hatching a plan.  DH and I would go sit on the side of the A4, watch the Funeral on BBC iPlayer via my iPad and then pay our respects to the Funeral Cortège.  We knew the route for the cortège because TFL had published a list of road closures.

It all went off like clockwork.  We packed our picnic chairs, travel mugs of coffee, a hot lunch in wide mouthed thermoses, the iPad, etc, and drove to a side-street near the A4, arriving just as the Funeral was starting, and set up.  The road was lined with police officers, airmen and solders. When the officer-in-charge gave the signal for the 2 minutes silence, followed by the National Anthem, we stood to attention, too.  More and more people came to line the road and, eventually, this happened:

We even made it - fleetingly - onto the television. If you look very carefully at the next photo, you may just be able to spot my yellow chair and DH’s purple one, in the top left-hand corner, with us standing in front and our friend, Howard, standing behind my chair.

(Yes, I photographed the television.)

The following Saturday (24th), I went to Green Park to see the tributes that the general public had left.  There were thousands.  I wandered around, reading the messages and I cried.  Some were incredibly moving:

While others were just beautiful:

- Pam