NEWCASTLE fashion designer Jean Bas considers Queen Elizabeth II the person she admires most.
"The Queen's story is our history," said Bas, a Royalist.
"She was a constant. It was almost like 'If the world stops we've still got the Queen'.
"I think it's very rare to find someone as loved, admired and respected. We were privileged to have lived through her reign."
Bas received the news of the Queen's death in a 6am text from her daughter.
"If there's one thing I've borrowed from [the Queen] in spades it's the discipline to be ruled by rituals rather than emotions and what you might want to do - you do what's right and what's of benefit to the world," Bas said.
But Friday was an exception.
"I'm always just getting out of bed at 6am and I just lay on my bed for one hour - [usually] I'm a five, four, three, two, one, out."
Bas said the Queen's death hit hard because she was considered "immortal", as well as a reminder of older family members who had died.
"'You can't take that away from us', that's how I felt about death," she said.
"[We thought] 'We've got the Queen, she's going to live forever', no-one thought she was ever leaving us... she's 96 but I think we thought she was going to live to 600 and something.
"She was consistently the one thing that never changed.
"The way she made the world feel like a calm, safe, organised place is something that has gone.
"She represented the home fires... everyone felt by the end of her reign like we knew her."
Bas said former UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill wrote of meeting the Queen when she was just two years old that she had "an air of authority and reflectiveness astonishing in an infant."
"When I was growing up in churches and things like that we were always under the belief that King David was anointed by God and I have no reason to not think she was an anointed one, because it's a curious thing of history [how she came to be Queen]," she said.
"I would say I believe she was our gift.
"For such a tiny person she had the greatest presence on earth."
Bas said the Queen would have striven to be the best she could be in any role.
"But gosh if there's one thing you could say it's she was the very best version of a Queen this earth has ever seen. She was it.
"She took her role seriously, never thought of retirement... she died at the post, you may as well say."
Bas said the Queen's role as a truck mechanic during the war contributed to her sense of service and duty.
"It was that sleeves rolled up thing that endeared her to us and she really was the first female mover and shaker, she just took things by the horns in her very silent way," she said.
"She did these really subliminal subtle things that just said 'I'm a woman and not to be messed with'...whatever she was dealt she would rise to the occasion."
She also continued to be curious, adapt and learn.
Bas said she was "captured" by the Queen's contrasts - she maintained a simple diet but made gin and wore exquisite clothes but an anorak and gumboots for fishing and hunting - and her "scallywag" side.
She drove Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia around Balmoral and appeared in a skit with Daniel Craig for the 2012 London Olympics Opening Ceremony.
She had "snatches of normality" and fed and walked her dogs.
Bas said she would raise a glass of the Queen's preferred aperitif, two parts Dubonnet to one part gin.
"We will reflect on her and what she contributed.
"We will want those ordinary stories of an extraordinary woman to be told and retold again and again, because that's how memories are made."
