Home Thought from Abroad

Here's a thought. If barristers who take silk are called QC when there's a queen on the throne, and KC when there's a king, why not extend the principle to other areas of royal-inflected language? As long as we're carrying on the with whole stupid system at all, let's at least do it non-sexistly. The rules about succession were recently changed so that sons could no longer leapfrog daughters, but why - when we have a female monarch - is it still called a "kingdom"?

I propose that while there's a queen on the throne, we should refer to this as a queendom, and the name of the country should be the United Queendom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, or UQ for short. This would have the advantage that "You queue" is virtually our national motto anyway, although I like to think that informal expressions of concern ("You 'kay?") are not entirely out of character.

We'd better hurry though, for the current queen is elderly, and beyond her stretches a line of sons even to the crack of doom.

Better still, we could just have a republic...