She was so many things to so many people: monarch, matriarch, logo redesign project...

I have always been mystified by the Cerebos salt logo.

It is a struggle to imagine what went through the minds of shoppers in days gone by. “Ah bless,” they’d say. “There’s a boy chasing after a defenceless, flightless infant bird and trying to pour salt over its head. I wonder if, in his youthful exuberance, he will accidentally stamp on the bird and kill it… How utterly charming! ”

A much easier proposition is to imagine the logo design department of a long-ago era, possibly as part of a team-building exercise. Picture a smoky, Victorian meeting room of wooden panelled walls, leather sofas and upholstered trousers. Seams of thick smoke waft through the air, rising from unattended cigars in ashtrays and the open fireplace, triggering climate change several generations into the future and, no doubt, “a real pea-souper ahtdoors, Mary Poppins!”

A tall figure at the mantlepiece finishes stoking the fire, having thrown on a fresh street orphan to replenish the flames, and turns to his colleagues.

“Settle down gentlemen” – because they were surely all gentlemen in those days – “It is time to antopleriach the contrarialities of our cercontagrious confibulatiries.”

Everyone looks at each other with knitted eyebrows. Several of them have moustaches that have knitted themselves to their sideburns. One of the team pipes up – he is smoking a pipe, you see – and asks the question that is on the team’s lips.

“Pray excuse the interruption, Sir Logoroyd, but what the flying fuck?”

“Apologies, Mr Ramett-Uphardly. I thought that was how we are supposed to speak in olden times. Ahem. We are gathered here to choose one of these three final designs for our Salt Marketing Board account.”

He instructs the unpaid work-experience youth – it was either than or join his sister on the fire – to hold up three beautifully painted logos on canvas, complete with gilted oak frames carved into a laurel fashion.

“Which would the assemblitude prefer? One is rather partial to Logo A – a boy chasing after the chick and trying to pour salt down its back.”

The room resonates with approving murmurs of “How charming!” and “That’s lovely!” and “Stamp on the bastard!”

Sir Logoroyd continues: “However, there has been strong interest in Logo B – a boy tying a firework to a kitten’s tail.”

The team gushes: “Extraordinary!”, “Genius!” and “Ha ha! It looks terrified!”

“And of course there’s Logo C,” finishes Sir L, “A boy punching a goat in the face. Now, gentlemen, we must choose!”

A no-brainer, really.

The topic came to my own no-brain while suffering the surprisingly poor quality of obituaries being published this morning for the late Queen. I’d been hoping for a rollicking good romp through 70 years of insane British history but all we got was nervous reminders of Diana’s GTA fail in Paris, some tiresome bollocks about the funeral route as if I had turned on my satnav for entertainment over breakfast, and even duller observations by obsequious toadies about the new King Charles III.

For my European and American colleagues, here’s a quick update on our earlier, albeit short-lived, Caroligian era.

The sequel was definitely more fun than the original but I have no high hopes for the third in the franchise. I hear that Sigourney Weaver’s not even in it.

Most startling was the amount of wordage in newspapers this morning devoted to the challenge of having to change the Queen’s images, logos and coats of arms now that she is not Queen any more. To make it worse, here am I doing exactly that myself.

Apparently it is really urgent (it says here) that currency notes and coins are re-issued featuring a ‘Charles III Photo Opportunity,’ or C-3PO for short. This strikes me as odd since I clearly remember when I was a toddler that all coins were embossed with the likeness of George VI, even though he had died a good 15 years earlier.

His daughter Elizabeth only really made her mark on coinage with the advent of decimalization from 1970 onwards. I had George VI shillings – subsequently reinterpreted as 5p pieces – in my piggy bank right up until the 1980s.

So what’s the rush now? Give it 15 years, like their forebears did, and the Royal Mint might be able to skip a generation. Besides, by then, we’ll probably have switched to US dollars, like all poor countries eventually do.

However, I confess to being intrigued about what will happen to the ‘By Royal Warrant of Appointment’ coat of arms that they put on boxes of Weetabix and packets of fags (or used to). There was always critical amusement to be had out of observing what a lion looks like when drawn by someone who has obviously never seen a lion before.

I guess the coat of arms itself will not change but it would be a good opportunity to have it redrafted with a better lion. The unicorn is OK, mind: pretty true to life in fact.

The one animal missing from the coat of arms is a shape-shifting lizard. Talk about a missed opportunity.

Indeed, it is curious that the topic of shape-shifting lizards is entirely missing from the obituaries that I read this morning. It’s always the first thing I think about when someone says “Oh, the Queen…” I’m not sure why this is – maybe it’s part of the occult mystery surrounding the pageantry of royalty.

I am not particularly attracted to High Magic – I dabbled in it as a student but could never complete a ceremony without giggling – but I would have loved to have watched royal alien reptiles face off with demonic forces in an all-singing, all-dancing spectacular in the centre of London.

Just imagine if someone had found a way to bring the Queen and the Devil together in the Albert Hall. Too late now, I guess.

I do wonder what the Queen thought about all that David Icke business. Hopefully it was a mix of amusement and frustration that he had found out.

This is my roundabout way of saying that, as a committed republican, I think the idea of having a Queen is enormously silly but that the Queen that Britain actually ended up with for 70 years was worth all the silliness.

Without that Queen – the very specific one that we had – there’s not a lot to latch on to. No end of logo changes and postage stamp photoshoots can now hide the growing realisation that there is, and has never been, a British identity. But you could always point at the Queen and say to yourself, yeah, that’s what it is.

There may be better written constitutions and more efficient democracies elsewhere… but she was our shape-shifting lizard.

Inevitable and crassly obvious video by unpleasant ex-cool old git follows. It’s still a good one, I hope you agree.