LONDON, U.K. -- Everybody’s still talking about the Queen and her address to the nation last night. OK, maybe that’s a wild exaggeration, but a lot of people are. How great she looked. How caring she sounded. More grandmother, than grand monarch. The green dress was perfect. I wonder if she was tempted to wear grey, or something a little more sombre.

Green, I’m happy to pass along, is considered soothing and youthful. Green has healing power, and is “understood to be the most restful and relaxing colour for the human eye to view,” according to one website I consulted. I assume she knew that. The Queen would.

Your majesty, how do you manage to look ageless? Don’t you have aches and pains, a little arthritis in those royal joints? Swollen ankles maybe? My mother died at the about the same age the Queen is now. She’d undergone two hip operations by then and was very tired at the end. She just wanted to sleep.

I only mention that because I used to compare my mother to the Queen. My mother wore glasses that looked like the Queen’s, her hair was cut the same as the Queen’s. Was she copying her style? Quite likely. As our white Anglo-Saxon family grew up, the Queen’s family grew up. That much we had in common.

We never missed a Christmas broadcast. We sang God Save the Queen at school, at almost every public event, from village council meetings to hockey games. At least that’s the way I remember it.

The Queen was a constant. She stood for service and allegiance. It’s interesting to be a visitor in her country now and witness the second Elizabethan age coming to a close. Her address to the nation last night was indeed soothing, and very likely the last of its kind.

This morning, the British headlines were all about her “rousing message” meant to “lift the nation’s spirits.” She invoked memories of the blitz, of wartime singer Vera Lynn, and of the days ahead, when family and friends will meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when. Am I wrong to suggest she was being spiritual there, knowing how many friends and family members are going to be taken by this terrible plague.

Her own prime minister is now in hospital with persistent COVID-19 symptoms, which was much discussed over breakfast.

He: “Boris Johnson going to the hospital is a big wake-up call for the British.”

She: “It sounds serious. I wonder how long they’ll keep him there?”

We are toasting homemade sesame seed bagels and Irish soda bread. There’s a lot of great baking going on under lockdown

She: “How much do you think they’ll tell us about his condition?”

He: “I’m not sure you can keep something like that a secret. The tabloids will be all over it.”

Indeed, the Daily Mail ran a huge, all-caps headline on its front page this morning: “BORIS ON OXYGEN.” The Sun went with: “VIRAL CRISIS.”

So there we are on this Monday, Day 14 under lockdown, with awful predictions of what suffering lies ahead. Too many health-care workers getting sick. Not enough testing being done. A prime minister who might die. And as for me, I called somebody in the park an idiot.

Sometimes one’s mouth gets carried away by one’s obsession.

“I am not an idiot,” came the response.

She was walking her dogs without keeping them on a lead. In our neighborhood, that continues to rank as a shameful unwillingness to share in the sacrifice of lockdown.

I didn’t think she could hear me. She could. It wasn’t the way I wanted this week to start -- an argument in an otherwise peaceful park at 7 o’clock in the morning. The dogs of course could care less. It’s the humans who are suffering.

So, a reckoning, at the end of this fourteenth day. We all need to hang in there and remember what the Queen said:

“We should take comfort that while we may have more still to endure better days will return.”

#COVIDIOT