“She spoke to us, and I’m sure she had that kind of conversation a thousand times a day,” said Ben Mitchell, recalling his meeting in Cairo, “but when I spoke to her, she felt so individual and real.” Perth with the Queen, who passed away last week at the age of 96.
Tens of thousands of people lined the Queen’s coffin path on Sunday for the Scottish city of Edinburgh, the first stop on a journey that will end with a state funeral on September 19. in London.
Mitchell and his friends, who had driven for two hours to meet the Queen, were standing in front of a parapet in a crowd of thousands when she and her husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, approached them.
“It wasn’t just out of literature, ‘I have to do this,’ she actually went in and asked about us,” he added.
Mitchell grew up in regional Western Australia before settling in Maitland, New South Wales, nearly 10 years ago. He is the youngest candidate to be elected to Maitland Council and is now serving his second term.
Mitchell is a member of the Royal Australian League and says he would like the monarchy to be apolitical. He said his fellow millennials are more of a “royal generation,” despite renewed calls for Australia to be a republic.
Prince Philip was 99 years old when he died in April last year.
