Tina Thorpe, a Londoner, said the wall-to-wall coverage by the British media over the last week was too much.
"I think it's going overboard," said Thorpe, 62. "It's interesting, but I don't like the endless royal commentary. We are being told how to mourn."
Thorpe said she enjoyed celebrating the queen's Platinum Jubilee in the summer and organized a street party, but that was more about the community coming together. The queen's death has elbowed aside news of anything else.
"What is going on in Pakistan? What's going on in the rest of the world? What about Ukraine?" Thorpe said.
Such concerns were set aside inside the abbey, where Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, gave a homily that ended with the words "We will meet again" — an echo of a message delivered by the queen during the COVID-19 pandemic to comfort those who had lost loved ones. Her use of the phrase was itself drawn from the song "We'll Meet Again" by Vera Lynn, an iconic piece in Britain from World War II.
Soon after, a military bugler played the Last Post, similar to Taps in the U.S., signaling the service's conclusion and the start of two minutes of silence in remembrance of the queen. It was a quiet that hung heavy outside the abbey's walls: Takeoffs and landings at London's Heathrow Airport, one of the world's busiest, were suspended for half an hour so as not to disrupt the silence. In Hyde Park, many stood ramrod straight, with heads bowed in a moment of uniform solemnity remarkable for a crowd that size.
Funeral attendees then sang the national anthem, some of them saying the words "God save the king" for the first time. A final lament from the queen's bagpiper brought the service to a close.
Then, as the sun pierced through the heavy cloud cover that had blanketed London in the morning, Royal Navy sailors took the casket once more to Wellington Arch, to the sounds of a funeral march backed by Big Ben's tolling and the loud report of artillery guns. The coffin was loaded onto a hearse, which drove to Windsor Castle, where the royal family is to lay the queen to rest in a private ceremony in St. George's Chapel.
After the funeral, the tables outside the City of Quebec pub just across from Hyde Park filled up quickly.
"To the queen," a group of three friends said as they clinked glasses of Guinness beer and watched ongoing BBC coverage of the procession on a cellphone.
Reflecting on "the end of an era," Zoe Dearsley marveled at the queen's seven decades of service.
"She served for all that time with such grace. To be 96, two days from death and still doing her duty, meeting with Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, probably the last thing she wanted to do, it's just remarkable."
Dearsley's boyfriend, Dan Ellis, said that, as a native South African, he's always been somewhat less enamored of the British monarchy but still recognized the queen's dedication and staying power.
"I'm somewhat skeptical of monarchy generally, but she had such character," he said. "She was the best of leadership."
