A clip zooming round news feeds today shows the King, in the de jure uniform of the foreign tour, a pale suit and dark glasses, grooving down Bay Street in Nassau with a pair of cowbells in his hands and a lion’s head bobbing over his shoulder. He was swaying to a Junkanoo band, and the Royal Family put it on Instagram. Within the hour he was the Dancing King. The late Queen’s favorite song was Dancing Queen (Angela Kelly told Katie Nicholl as much), so insert your own joke here.
It is, we all know, a well-worn routine. The King flies to a hot country, puts on the sunglasses and dances. But watching the Nassau footage, whether just once or several times over, and I think this one is a bit special, because he looks grateful. You can see the gratitude in his face.
You can see other things in his face too, and on this platform we don’t need to pretend otherwise. He looks old. He has lost a lot of weight, which was obvious when I saw him in person the other day, and his tailors can’t keep up with his weight loss; the suit hangs off him. He looks exhausted, just like a man of 77 who has been in cancer treatment for several years, and is working crowds in the tropics. But he also looks like a man doing exactly what he is supposed to be doing, and visibly touched that people still turn out to shake his hand. That he feels well enough to pull this off at all, after the intense fears he could drop down dead in early 2024, is the good news of the week.
