Essay

Royal mail

By Samantha Loong

This year, Queen Elizabeth II celebrates her diamond jubilee. My grandmother is a big fan of the queen, and has keenly followed Her Majesty's movements throughout the years. She can clearly recall watching the queen's coronation on television back in the '50s. "The queen was so young and thin back then," reminisced gran recently.

The queen's relatively slender face graced all the banknotes in New Zealand when my family and I first arrived in the '80s. The first thing I noticed about the queen was that she looked uncannily like my grandmother — the smile, the eyes and even the perm. The fact that the queen and my grandmother are of completely different ethnicities didn't stop my 8-year-old self from writing a letter to Her Majesty to tell her of the resemblance. I also added that I would love to hang out with her should she be making any royal visits to Wellington. I figured she probably liked her mail on the professional side, so I typed out my letter on a computer and carefully printed it onto a crisp sheet of white A4 paper using a dot-matrix printer — with a freshly replaced ink ribbon, of course.

After posting the letter, I pretty much forgot about it. Then, almost a year later I received some mail. It was the most beautiful envelope I had ever seen. The envelope quality was so exceptional that it remained stiff despite having traveled across vast oceans. The edges of the envelope were framed in black and my name and address were typed in a simple serif font on the front. On the back was something I had only seen in movies — a melted blob of red wax imprinted with what looked like an intricate seal of several lions. "Who's this from?" my parents asked, but I honestly had no idea.

Opening it, the memories of writing to Her Majesty came flooding back and I was both anxious and suddenly a bit embarrassed. It was a very polite, typed letter thanking me for writing to the queen, but unfortunately the two of us would be unable to meet due to her busy schedule. It was signed by a lady-in-waiting. At the time, I didn't know what a lady-in-waiting was and wondered if she was waiting to be the next queen. I was a bit confused but also extremely excited to have received some truly royal mail.

If notified in advance, the queen also sends people in the Commonwealth a card for their 100th birthday. Although I'm a bit suspicious of how old my grandmother actually is — there were several years in a row where she kept telling me she was turning 76 — she insists that she and the queen are the same age. Should the both of them be around when they turn 100 (Queen Elizabeth is now 86), it would be wonderful if my grandmother received a card from Her Majesty. Who knows, maybe gran will send her one in return.

Shukan ST: JUNE 15, 2012

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