Celtic’s Preparations For Europe Are Wholly Unaffected By All The Nuttiness Elsewhere.

No football today, just a collective collapse into social insanity.

The Royal Beekeeper went this morning to tell his bees that the queen (as opposed to their queen) was dead and that they must now “buzz for King Charles.” Someone is buzzing something anyway.

He described it as one of the “saddest days of his life.”

I would feel the same if that was a part of my job description and a duty I was actually expected to fulfil.

One picture from outside Ibrox showed a marmalade sandwich wrapped in cellophane with a note to “Lizzie” on it.

What a pointless, stupid, exercise. Do you know how hard it is to get cellophane off a sandwich? Even a homeless person probably won’t be able to eat that now. Especially after it’s been lying there for a couple of days.

One woman on BBC News 24 held up a vase which she had brought with her to the Palace gates to pay her respect. Why a vase? Her nan’s ashes were in it and her nan had always loved the queen and would have wanted to be there.

And I wonder to myself; these are supposed to be normal people.

But this is definitely not normal behaviour.

It’s bizarre. It’s like Hidden Hills opened a whole new campus and filled it overnight.

Large parts of the country have been gripped in a sort of collective madness.

Keir Starmer yesterday talked about how she “ruled over us” but simultaneously “lived amongst us.”

Even if the first part doesn’t offend you the second part should.

All this time I thought she was up in a castle somewhere when she’s been in sheltered housing in East Kilbride, getting supplies from the local food-bank and trying not to run her power card down.

It’s hard to stomach this sometimes.

We’re a modern society, and one where vast swathes of the country are living in poverty or about to be plunged into it, and everything has come to a halt because the hereditary monarch has passed on.

And that’s the appropriate term. Amongst the stuff that she “passed on” was an estate worth over £1 billion.

This is everything that’s wrong with the country summarised in the life and death of a single individual.

It comes across most, perhaps, in the mawkish sentimentality of Daily Mail and Express readers, the very people who don’t believe that the social safety net should even exist for her “subjects” and who cannot imagine what life will be like without some distant figure reigning over them.

The very “values” she was supposed to embody, in the meantime, are the very ones that their papers of choice piss all over every single day of the week.

Over at Ibrox, some of their fans are truly struggling with the complexity and depth of it.

Read their forums and you’ll see how many of them are trying hard to adapt to the new songs they have to learn and the new terminology that replaces the old.

God save the Queen is now God save the King.

The Queens Eleven is now The Kings Eleven.

This is what passes for intellectual heavy lifting over there.

The changing of a word.

It is an effort most of them will be struggling with for quite a while.

The general feeling that they and she had some kind of “special relationship” is only one manifestation of the delusions all involved over there are losing themselves in.

“We owed her so much” one bleated on Twitter, to which some wag answered “£120 million or thereabouts.”

Which made me laugh even if the final figure is disputed.

Not content with today’s fixtures being called off, they want Tuesday’s game cancelled as well with some of them even suggesting the team should “forfeit” the game on general principle. The 3-0 defeat they’d be inflicted with is probably less than the doing they’ll take, so I can see why a surprising number of them appear willing to take it on the chin.

In the meantime, from Celtic, two statements.

One acknowledging her death and the other acknowledging that we were “informed” that today’s game was off.

Nothing more.

At Celtic, all are too busy getting on with the day jobs for all this shirt-rending.

We are preparing for the game in midweek.

That’s all we’re doing.

We’re ignoring all the white noise and the mass hysteria elsewhere.

Whilst on the forums across town some are demanding that their players be spared having to “play through their grief” (as if all those foreign nationals even care that some old timer has popped her clogs) our players are being treated like professionals and – more importantly – adults and getting on with it.

We have a massive game to play on Wednesday. Massive.

Thank God our players and our staff are wholly focussed on that, and that all the craziness around them hasn’t affected anything that we’re doing. Nor should it either. We live in the real world after all.