The week before the Queen died, I bought a tiny drawing by Cecil Beaton: a design for a yellow headdress. It’s undated, and perhaps it’s not very distinguished, though Beaton won an Oscar for the costumes he created for Gigi and My Fair Lady. But these things hardly matter to me. I love its colours – shades of green-yellow, like the wings of a goldfinch – and it cost me no more than the price of a return ticket to Manchester (a rarefied, but highly damning indictment of our railway companies, I feel).
What timing, though. Beaton was one of the Queen’s favourite photographers, a relationship that began when she was 16 – she was in pink taffeta, he was aiming to shoot her “in the manner of Gainsborough” – and which might be said to have reached its climax when he was chosen to take the official pictures at the coronation, an event for which he famously arrived hung over, a supply of sandwiches stashed inside his top hat.
Beaton could be waspish: Malice in Wonderland, as Jean Cocteau had it. But he loved photographing the dear old Baked Bean, whose regard he described as “unhurried and gentle” and whose “very small” figure never ceased to thrill him when it appeared at the end of a corridor, dress swishing.
It’s always exciting, getting a picture back from the framer. But I await the return of this little drawing with even more anticipation than usual.
The hand that drew it pressed the shutter on a camera that was used to photograph the woman whose death will tomorrow bring London to a complete standstill.
A mug for art
The Barbican’s Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) retrospective is, to use a non-art critical term, bat-shit crazy: a veritable parody of a show by a feminist performance artist. Gaze in amazement at a scroll the artist pulled from her vagina! Feast your eyes on scraps of loo roll she imprinted with her menstrual blood. Wander these “vulvic spaces”, and feel angry and mighty and all sorts of other major emotions. (In the shop, I experienced a powerful throb of covetousness when I saw the Schneemann-inspired, hand-crafted mugs, which are more attractive by far than anything in the galleries.)
Were the curators trying for irony when they hit on the idea of showing Schneemann’s film of herself having sex in a pitch-dark room lined with red velvet cinema seats? I don’t know. Either way, I didn’t fancy settling down beside the two blokes who were enjoying it when I visited. No wonder the exhibition seems to be aiming for some kind of record when it comes to trigger warnings, though I didn’t myself take up the offer of “support” it kindly extends in one of these on behalf of its staff.
It’s my funeral
It can only be a good thing if the Queen’s funeral encourages people to think about their own arrangements. But you can take this too far. Over a bottle of red wine, my beloved domestic colleague and I talked about what we want at the end and it all got rather out of hand. For him: choirboys singing Todd Rundgren’s Love Is the Answer (“can you make sure the voices crack on the falsetto bit at the end?”) and the last lines of Tennyson’s Ulysses (“It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew…”).
For me: a brass band playing Elgar’s Nimrod and as much of TS Eliot’s Little Gidding as the (inevitably vast) crowd will tolerate, intoned lightly by Simon Russell Beale.
• Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist
