I know I have posted this one before but there we are …
‘Dialogue with the Queen’ by Jan Moran Neil
Last night I dreamt the Queen said to me,
“Oh Janet, weren’t you in the crowd at Jubilee
in … nineteen-seventy-seven?
Wasn’t it that little town in Devon?”
“Falmouth,” I replied.
“Ah yes, and in nineteen-eighty-two
at Regent’s Park, we remember asking you -
‘how has been the weather?’”
I said“I replied to you, ‘not bad’ but I lied.
In fact the weather could not have been wetter.”
“Janet,” said she,
“you were the invisible voice of Puck’s fairy.
This, I believe, is what you have always been …
a little one doing good deeds unseen,
It’s always so nice to see you
and we are always so interested too
to know how you are in particular.
And so is the Duke of Edinburgh.”
This is called ‘illusions of grandeur’.
It’s true – I was in the crowd in Falmouth in 1977 when the Queen had been Queen for twenty-five years. Then I did meet her and the Duke of Edinburgh, as I was an invisible First Fairy in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in Regent’s Park in 1982. But the dialogue is all fiction as the last line states. In my dreams.
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended—
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
Words overheard in a crowd in Falmouth in 1977? Perhaps.