One thing is for sure. She did leave a mark. Winston God damn Churchill was her first time minister! When I will be old and have grandchildren, I will tell my grandchildren how I became a British citizen. And when they’ll ask me when, I’ll tell them during the reign of The Queen. And they will know who I mean.
God rest her soul.
And I realised that's exactly what she was. She was iconic in the religious sense - an embodied icon of a nationalist religion.
This suddenly made a lot of things about the current state of the UK much clearer.
There is no practical sense in which she was genuinely "grandma of the nation." That personification goes one way only - from the population to what psychologists would call a parental projection.
Objectively she paid almost no attention to her subjects, except for a tiny number who were socially or financially notable.
She may have been witty and personable socially - as reported by many people - and perhaps the most interesting thing about her as an individual is that she trained as a mechanic during the war, taking delight in a job that women didn't usually do, and continued that interest through her life.
But I find the crypto-religious elements of the UK's (actually mostly just England's) relationship with her very unsettling.
And I genuinely believe she could have done far more for the people of the UK than she did. Especially recently.
Monarchy is a strange thing. When I flew to Bali on a Thai airline in the 90s a fair few pages of the inflight magazine were full of carefully manicured praise for the talents of the reigning monarch.
It seemed bizarre and alien. But over time I realised the UK has a similar relationship with its monarchy.
And where Heads of State are nominally expected to work for the Greater Good, it seems to be assumed that monarchs do the same, mostly by modelling social ease and extreme privilege.
This is all quite odd. I'm sure there are reasons for it - possibly evolutionary - and I suspect they're not obvious.
My impression is that William benefited from just not being Charles, and some of the sheen rubbing off from his mother. Both of those things only go so far, and as he moves more and more into public responsibilities, he has more and more chances to bungle up. From the high of the early 2010s, the only way for him to trend was down, and its inevitable. William is, what, 40? Charles wasn't quite reviled when he was 40 too - he grew into that role.
Even if the monarchy isn't abolished outright before Louis or a sibling ascends, it's very possible that the United Kingdom in its current state may not. The unified crowns of England and Scotland may exist in title only, if that.