Reflections

 Like many, I never met her – although she was only about ten feet away when she walked past me at Newbury Races, about fifteen years ago. Like many, too, I remember getting a commemorative gift, an engraved teaspoon, at primary school in 1953, the year of her coronation. It feels a long way away, like the small milk bottles placed on the big school radiators, rhyming skipping games, and playing ‘wee house’.
At school in Northern Ireland, the history and geography of Ireland were not part of the curriculum. We learned the history and geography of Britain. I could, and still can, list the English monarchs from Henry Tudor to Charles III, although I didn’t feel connected to any of them, except as characters in the plays of Shakespeare.
But the visit of the late Queen Elizabth to Ireland in 2011 moved me to my core. She wore green and spoke a greeting in Irish. More significantly, she laid a wreath at a memorial to Irish who died in the fight for Independence.  She shook hands with Martin McGuinness. Big, generous conciliatory gestures. She showed us how to ‘bow to the past but not be bound by it’. The old antagonisms felt just that, old. I felt optimistic.
Brexit quenched the optimism she had kindled as the old antagonisms resurfaced in Northern Ireland. 
I wonder if the respect and admiration, expressed in condolences by all sections of society here, will re-ignite my optimism. Will Northern Ireland find in the reactions to her death, the peace I saw in prospect when she came to Ireland in 2011? I hope so.