23 November

During the anthems for the beginning of the Ashes today, it struck me what a hopeless anthem God Save the Queen is. The entire anthem is just a grovelling homage to the monarch, there’s not one reference to the country itself. I wonder if that’s deliberate, whether at a time when the Commonwealth was more of a thing and every Commonwealth country used it as an anthem, reference to Britain or England etc. would have made the anthem less suitable for this wide use. Dunno, but it’s a tempting theory.