As they say, what goes up must come down: yes, most things, especially good ones (and, luckily, also bad ones…), eventually come to an end.
In a way, we are experiencing this feeling after the last few days following Queen Elizabeth II's death. By now her coffin has been enjoying a more active life than most of us, leaving her beloved home in Balmoral, arriving to the Palace of Holyrood and now being moved to St. Giles' Cathedral in Edinburgh, before the final journey to London.
It may be disrespectful to start thinking about the end of the monarchy now as people are in mourning and tributes are still pouring in, but dissenting voices are already whispering behind the back of the royal family members. Now that we know who will take care of the corgis (Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson and here we're kind of sad for the corgis…), that the many colours of Elizabeth II's wardrobe palette were analysed in pictures similar to the iconic "Pantone Merkel" ones, and now that King Charles III has already turned annoying by getting angry at a pen tray, the ghosts of extreme privileges and Britain's legacy of colonialism are slowly rising.
The Queen was definitely a symbol of unity for the UK, but, now that she's gone, many are already wondering which of the 15 countries part of the 54 member states of the Commonwealth that still have the queen as their head of state (among them Australia, Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, Canada, Grenada, Jamaica, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea) will opt for independence.
Last year, the Caribbean island nation of Barbados removed Queen Elizabeth as its head of state and became a republic, following in the footsteps of Mauritius, which did the same back in 1992, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago and Dominica in the 1970s, and Fiji in 1987.
Who knows what will happen in future. We certainly can't say, or can we? There is something small that we may use as an inspiration, but also as a crystal ball – stamps.
In the last few decades stamps have become archaeological relics: most of us don't use them anymore, opting for faster digital means of communication, yet stamps still preserve a special allure. The advent of emails may have turned them into obsolete things, but some artists, recombining colours and shapes, started using them as the main materials for inventive collages with architectural twist about them, turning from collectors into builders, giving a new value to these otherwise obsolete pieces of paper.
If any of you ever had a member of their family keen on collecting stamps, you may remember albums filled with rows of coloured stamps, among them silhouettes and portraits of emperors and empresses, kings and queens.
My grandfather was an avid collector and history and geography combined in the pages of his albums: as he arranged his prized possessions in the albums, my brother watched transfixed by the colours and the trivia about the various countries and monarchs (shout of to him for pointing me at the images of the stamps featured in this post). Quite often, my grandfather's neatly arranged stamps with portraits of defunct kings and queens on red, blue, violet, sepia and green background, turned the grandeur of the royals into flat paper parades.
Those paper parades of dead monarchs could be used as cautionary tales: they remind us all that there are hundreds of stamps with Elizabeth II's portraits for nations that changed face, name and flag and that transformed with time or disappeared into other states – among them the Crown Colony of Sarawak, Perak, and the Colony of Aden, just to mention a few ones.
After Elizabeth II's death, the Royal Mail announced that stamps bearing the image of the Queen will remain valid till the end of January 2023. Yet, soon, like the stamps of colonies that don't exist anymore, they will become obsolete, replaced by images of a king, and, maybe one day, by the stamps of a republic.
In a world in constant turmoil, with the Russia-Ukraine war still going on, climate change dominating our lives even when we don't want to admit it and the spectre of a pandemic lurking somewhere, obsolescence is looming for the monarchy, like a stamp for a forgotten country. Turn this theme into your inspiration for the day - the power of seeing the future in obsolescence - because even a simple rectangle of paper can turn into a revealing crystal ball.
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