Queen Elizabeth II has died

It's weird, I've never considered myself a "royalist" but this news has affected me quite strongly. I just burst into tears unexpectedly on hearing this news and I don't quite understand why I feel so very sad. I guess I have grown up and lived my whole life (as a Brit) seeing and hearing the Queen, singing "God save the Queen" etc, and this news made me suddenly feel very old, very nostalgic, with the sense that all things pass in time, which makes my heart ache deeply.

I share your feeling. I was struck by a deep sense of sadness as well. Maybe it’s silly, I don’t know, I sort of felt she was the grandma of the nation. It was a nice feeling knowing she’s there and a sad one knowing she no longer is.

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.

The most useful Twitter comment I saw today described the Queen as "iconic".

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.