On This Day...

...57 years ago, in Kenya of all places, she found out that her father had died, and the rest of her life fell into place. It must be odd to be 25 and know, relatively suddenly, more or less exactly what you will do (barring revolution or other nuisances) until, like your predecessors for a millennium or so, you breathe your last.

Whatever one thinks about the form of government of which it has turned out to be her lot to be the latest (and I, at least, doubt the last) figurehead, it would be hard to deny that she has done a bang-up job.

Given her family history, it's not at all unlikely she'll keep on for another decade or more, like her mother moving ever more slowly and getting ever tinier. There is something moving in that, and somehow comforting.