An update from the motherland now that the Queen has slipped away. I was in movie theatre when the news was officially announced. Things had looked ominous since lunchtime when the PM was passed a note during the House of Commons debate on energy prices. Her grim-faced reaction spoke volumes. A copy of the note was then passed to the opposition benches to identical response.

A short while later an official comment was relayed by the royal physicians that the Queen’s status was a matter of concern. Word then came out that members of the immediate Royal family were heading to Balmoral. At this point it became clear the end was nigh, if not within days then hours.

The BBC cancelled all regular programming, the news presenters dressed in black. I watched some of the news footage, but when the Royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell began banging on about the state of mind of the Royal Corgis I decided I’d had enough.

Rain had been falling since lunchtime, but taking advantage of a short break in the downpour, I walked up the hill to my local cinema to watch a screening of the Penelope Cruz/Antonio Banderas movie ‘Official Competition’. The trailer suggests the film is a broad comedy but in fact it is more than that: a clever examination of actors’ egos, the skill of acting itself, and the idiocy at the heart of much movie making. All three leads give excellent performances – Cruz especially, able to balance absurdity with intelligence.

Within minutes of the movie starting however, there was a technical fault in the cinema, the screen switching to the film being shown in the adjacent screening room, an NFT live stream of ‘Much Ado About Nothing’. I later figured out that this must have happened at the exact moment the official announcement of the Queen’s death was being made.

Someone went to find one of the cinema workers, and within minutes the problem was rectified, the film digitally rewound and replayed from the beginning. However, in the rush to fix the problem, the film was now screened in a reduced perspective (the one used by the NFT). It therefore looked diminished, as if we were watching on a large TV screen.

Nevertheless, unwilling to interrupt the film again, we the British audience, stoic and as uncomplaining as ever, watched (and enjoyed) the film in its reduced state.

In hindsight it felt symbolic; the kind of behaviour of which the Queen herself would have approved.

© Simon Fellowes 9/9/2022