Pro­nounce­ments and spec­u­la­tion about why Queen Eliz­a­beth II was beloved invari­ably include her dig­ni­ty, demeanour and ded­i­ca­tion to duty. While all those are valid, I think the sim­ple answer is that even as she con­duct­ed her­self in a man­ner to which most of us can only aspire, she was in a sub­lim­i­nal way, per­ceived as ‘just like us’.

We know with­out being told that a crown placed on one’s head doesn’t mag­i­cal­ly end headaches, a slug­gish morn­ing after a bad night’s sleep, or just that plain old ‘enough already” feel­ing, to name but a few of life’s all-too-fre­quent vex­a­tions. We can sub­con­scious­ly sym­pa­thise with the fact that for the Queen, the options of call­ing in sick, or sim­ply post­pon­ing or opt­ing out of hum­drum tasks to catch a break or recu­per­ate didn’t exist. Even an inkling of being fed up or out of sorts risked spark­ing a firestorm of rumour and spec­u­la­tion. The Roy­al prin­ci­ple of “nev­er com­plain, nev­er explain” remained para­mount and admirable.
Like many of ‘us’, the Queen had chil­dren who from time to time and to greater or less­er degree gave cause for wor­ry. We can empathise with the indig­ni­ty and pain of hav­ing their “issues” aired in pub­lic, grist for ever-grind­ing rumour and gos­sip mills, fod­der for pro­fes­sion­al insul­ters and critics.
Albeit on a dif­fer­ent and fil­tered lev­el, Her Majesty was as vul­ner­a­ble as ‘us’ to the near-omnipo­tence grant­ed to users of social media to taunt, revile and mis­rep­re­sent. The sen­si­ble among us under­stand that priv­i­lege doesn’t ame­lio­rate the pain of insults, gra­tu­itous or otherwise.

                                 NOT-SO-NICE NEIGHBOURS

A sovereign’s sub­jects are all, metaphor­i­cal­ly speak­ing, her neigh­bours, which means just like ‘us’, she some­times had to put up with ver­sions of “the neigh­bours from Hell”. In the Queen’s case they were in the form of a near-per­pet­u­al cacoph­o­ny of cries that she and her fam­i­ly were at best anachro­nisms, at worst leech­es, heirs and suc­ces­sors to racists, enslavers, exploiters etc and etc. With no recourse to the equiv­a­lent of a restrain­ing order, she had to live with them in the knowl­edge that if their num­bers grow, it could pose a threat to all that she pledged to self­less­ly uphold. Hence, she was denied even the lux­u­ry of a cathar­tic riposte.
It’s no stretch to think that per­haps, like ‘us’, she under­stood from bit­ter expe­ri­ence the pithy def­i­n­i­tion a now-depart­ed friend of mine sport­ed on a tee shirt:
“STRESS: What hap­pens when the mind over­comes the body’s basic urge to choke the liv­ing s*** out of some a**h*** who des­per­ate­ly deserves it.”
The only dif­fer­ence between her and ‘us’ on that score is that she couldn’t wear the tee shirt even if she want­ed to.

                                         IT ALL HANGS OUT

Few women I know (or men for that mat­ter) rel­ish the idea of aging. Even few­er wel­come its sign­posts. Just look­ing in the mir­ror can be depress­ing. We don’t even want to imag­ine, but can sym­pa­thise with, how tax­ing it would be to have our ever-mul­ti­ply­ing lines, wrin­kles, sags and bags immor­talised in reg­u­lar offi­cial por­traits, pho­tographed by the sharpest eyes using the best lens­es mon­ey can buy every time we appear in pub­lic, then dis­played in news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines and on TV for all the world to see.
The way the Queen aged with a grace that kept her gen­uine­ly beau­ti­ful is, I sus­pect, an exam­ple many of ‘us’ envy.

                          COMMENT IS FREE…BUT…

We all bitch and moan and lat­er often wish we’d been a bit more temperate.
That, I think, is a major rea­son why the Queen’s ref­er­ence to 1992 as an annus hor­ri­bilis, a hor­ri­ble year, struck an ‘us’ chord.
It was a veiled ref­er­ence to the relent­less press cov­er­age of the col­lapse of three of her children’s mar­riages and the pub­li­ca­tion of Princess Diana’s tell-all mem­oir, which exposed scan­dals with­in the Roy­al fam­i­ly; the kind of “dirty laun­dry” no one wants aired in public.
Added to that was a fire that destroyed more than 100 rooms in Wind­sor Cas­tle. The sight of an obvi­ous­ly dis­traught Queen watch­ing it while wear­ing a rain­coat moved many. Sym­pa­thy waned when it was sug­gest­ed tax­pay­ers would pay for the repairs. The monar­chy won it back with the kind of “when life hands you a lemon, make lemon­ade” scheme that appeals to the ‘us’. Buck­ing­ham Palace was opened to the pub­lic for the first time ever on an admis­sion basis to help fund the Wind­sor restoration.
The Queen in a way spoke for all of ‘us’ when she not­ed that scruti­ny “can be just as effec­tive if it is made with a touch of gen­tle­ness, good humour and understanding.”
In that vein I’ll wager there are many among the ‘us’, who believe in free­dom of speech, who think that exer­cis­ing it by protest­ing the monar­chy dur­ing events to mark the Queen’s death, over­steps the bounds  respect and com­mon decency.
And what­ev­er those who dis­agree, and see cam­eras as an oppor­tu­ni­ty not to be missed may think, they will not make Her Majesty “turn in her grave”, even though they wish it to be so.
She was, you see, much more like ‘us’, than them.

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