AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Without a lead and with Her Majesty making no attempt to keep me by her side, I was soon scampering through the gardens and sniffing curiously in shrubs, pausing to detect what canines or other creatures may have passed that way, and lifting my leg to mark my royal canine territory. Absorbed in this important activity, I didn’t realise how far ahead of me the Queen had progressed until, looking up, I saw her on the path which, inexplicably, angled sharply away from the river bank, before turning back towards it. An unnecessary detour it seemed to me. Seeking to catch up with Her Majesty, I set off at some speed, opting for the short cut.
The earth was dark and wet, I discovered. It was muddy—very muddy. It was not like any ground I’d ever walked on.
Suddenly I wasn’t moving very fast. In fact, I wasn’t moving at all. I was stuck. My paws were disappearing below the surface. I was sinking into the mud, a putrid swamp at that! I yelped . . . twice. But there was no-one to hear me. The path ahead disappeared behind a boathouse and Her Majesty had disappeared with it. Would a burst of energy be enough to pull me from the mire?
I tried exactly this, but the faster I moved, the more I seemed to get bogged down. It wasn’t just my feet that were below the surface now—I was sinking to my knees! It was becoming a real struggle to stay upright. The greater my efforts to break free, the more I was drawn downwards into the thick, black stench.
As my stomach began to submerge, I became desperate. I barked with all the loud urgency I could muster, fixing my attention on where the path emerged from behind the boatshed. A strong gust of wind blowing in the wrong direction meant that the Queen couldn’t hear me. But I redoubled my efforts when I saw her making her way from the other side of the boatshed.
She stopped to pause, looked to each side, before glancing behind. I can’t say whether it was my frantic yapping coinciding with a momentary calming of the wind or Her Majesty detecting a movement in the swamp. But she suddenly turned and returned at speed, pointing towards me as two dark-clad men from security materialised. One of these, appearing from behind her, headed first towards the boatshed. Then he was hurrying in my direction with a canoe paddle in his hand. Like all security men, he was large, fast and muscular. In moments he was on the pathway next to me, slipping the oar into the mud underneath my stomach. Using the paddle as a lever he was hauling me upwards. Then he was dragging me towards him.
The Queen, flanked by another security man, was fast approaching as I was safely brought back to the path. There I rewarded my rescuer by shaking myself vigorously, casting a hundred flecks of stinking black mud all over his navy police uniform, not to mention a generous quantity onto his face too.
‘Oh, dear!’ said the Queen, arriving just in time to see him wipe his face with the back of his hand, succeeding only in smudging the mud more evenly across his features. ‘But thank you.’ She nodded in my direction. ‘We’re very grateful.’
Disaster averted, I looked up at her, wagging my now very black stump.
‘Would you like me to carry him back?’ offered security.
‘I think he can manage,’ replied Her Majesty. ‘You’re alright aren’t you, Nelson?’ She beckoned to me, so I took a few muddy steps in her direction. ‘But he’ll need a bath once we get home.’
Far from recoiling from this prospect, the policeman had obviously been touched by the Queen’s unfailing ability to conjure up the highest motives in those around her. ‘Very good, ma’am’ he replied, as though he could think of no happier way to spend a winter’s afternoon than bathing a filthy and foul-smelling corgi.
Soon afterwards, we were making our way back to the castle, this time with me walking most obediently to heel, with the security officer, making no pretence to remain invisible, a short distance behind us.
‘So, Nelson, what have we learned from that?’ asked Her Majesty conversationally.
To avoid the black swamp and not be fooled into taking short cuts across that particular part of the riverbank, I would have replied.
‘It was just as Michael said, don’t you think?’ she continued. Her Majesty was making a connection that I had so far failed to grasp. ‘Perception is misleading,’ she reminded me now. ‘The material world is not as it seems. Things we believe to be solid can be nothing more than our own imagination.’
I could see what she was getting at and looked up at her, black booted and chested no doubt, but my brown eyes bright with appreciation. Far from blaming me for my foolishness, she seemed to be saying that what had happened to me was simply part of being alive. ‘The dance of appearances,’ she confirmed a short while later. ‘Queens and canines. We can all be fooled.’
Her Majesty is well known for the very wide variety of people she meets at public events, such as state banquets, garden parties, Royal Variety concerts and the innumerable other events which crowd her calendar. But as you will already have gathered, my fellow subject, the really interesting meetings, the conversations when intriguing things are said, are almost always held in private.
One such conversation occurred only a few days after our visit to the chapel. It was the timing of it, as much as the insights themselves, which held a curious synchronicity.
A number of very eminent scientists had joined Her Majesty one afternoon for tea at Windsor Castle for a regular, if not frequent, get-together to explain recent developments in their fields. Seated on a variety of sofas and chairs, the scientists told the Queen and her advisers about important trends to do with the environment, nanotechnology and alternative energy sources. Lying on one of the rugs, I was much more interested in the mouth-watering display of savoury snacks laid out for afternoon tea.
After the briefing and the discussion that followed, the more interesting part of the proceedings commenced. The Queen and her guests rose to stretch their legs, while a butler and footmen began to serve the refreshments. Winston, Margaret and I did our bit to mix and mingle, engaging in our perennial quest for titbits. Winston, still ailing somewhat from his winter bug, had recovered sufficiently to fix his attentions on a professor who was so genuinely absent-minded that, during a previous visit, he had put a plate of salmon crudités on the floor, in order to draw a diagram on his napkin, while demonstrating some arcane principle of dematerialisation. Winston had seen to it that the crudités were soon no longer on the plate, thus providing a less arcane manifestation of the same principle.
Margaret was following a very portly environmentalist, perhaps in the hope that his passionate concern for the natural world would extend to her.
I tried my luck with a Cambridge artificial intelligence expert, who was deeply engrossed in conversation with a nanotechnologist. But after a while, I realised the two men were so engrossed in their highbrow conversation they hadn’t even noticed me. This was why I found myself heading back towards where Her Majesty was standing in discussion with a man with a very red nose, whose specialist field I couldn’t remember, and a female quantum scientist.
‘Most people are still stuck in direct perception theory,’ the man was saying. ‘They believe that their brains are passive receivers
of whatever streams through their eyes, ears and so on. Neuroscientists abandoned that view years ago.’
‘Really?’ asked Her Majesty. ‘Why is that?’
‘Apart from anything else, only 20 percent of fibres in the part of the brain that deals with visual imagery comes from the retina. The other 80 percent comes from the cortex, which is the part of the brain governing functions like memory.’ The neuroscientist had the Queen’s undivided attention. ‘So the process of perceiving something is more complex than people may assume. When we see, smell or taste something, it has far less to do with the thing itself than with our own cognitive processing, especially memory.’
At this point, the female quantum physicist became so excited that she launched into the conversation. A striking woman in her forties, with shoulder-length dark hair, dusky skin and an aquiline nose, her dark eyes were ablaze and her teacup rattled in its saucer. ‘What you’re saying, Professor Monday, is that what we see is not so much what’s out there, as what we expect to see?’ she asked.
‘Precisely!’ he chimed. ‘We call them brain hypotheses.’
‘One’s experience,’ observed the Queen, ‘is indirectly related to the external world.’
