A Mighty Bond The Second Elizabethan Age Is Over. A New Future Begins

The Queen's emotional hold over us was rooted in her lived experience of Britain's finest hour

- Jonathan Freedland

We knew the words would be uttered one day, but it was still a shock to hear them. The W Queen is dead.

Of course, we knew the moment was coming. When a photograph was released on Tuesday showing the monarch welcoming her newest prime minister - her 15th - at Balmoral, her face looked unfamiliarly gaunt. The Queen was a woman in her 90s and we are all mortal, even those whose blood flowed deepest blue.. yet her the announcement that she died "peacefully" yesterday afternoon will shake this country very deeply, for reasons we may not fully grasp.

Plenty will say that the nation has lost its grandmother, that we are a family bereaved of its matriarch - and that comparison is not so wide of the mark. Not because everyone knew or loved the Queen like a relative, because obviously that is not true. But the comparison holds in this much narrower sense: she was a fixed point in our lives, a figure of continuity when all around was in constant flux. Everything has changed since the day in 1952 when she inherited the throne.

That country of black-and-white television, gentlemen in hats and Lyons Corner Houses - and this one would barely recognise each other. And yet the one thing they have had - in common was her.

She was woven into the cloth of our lives so completely, we stopped seeing the thread long ago. It was not just the coins, the bank notes and the letter boxes. It was the fact that you could hear a song called Her Majesty from a different lifetime, written by a group that broke up half a century ago, and the majesty they were serenading was the same person who reigned until yesterday.

Longevity plays strange tricks like that. My grandmother was born in 1906 and died nearly 30 years ago, and yet the monarch for most of her adult lifetime was this same queen. Elizabeth was the head of state of this country for more than 70 years.