SARAH VINE: Packing up my home, our absent Queen and why life will never be the same again

There are times in life when reality hits you like a freight train. 

For me, it’s been the process of packing up the family home — the final, physical expression of the end of 20 years of marriage.

Echoes of the past drift like dustballs across the empty living-room floor; a forgotten photograph stirs memories of happier times.

It is both painful and cathartic, a letting go of something that once represented the core of my existence — but also a new beginning, the start of the next chapter.

I mention all this not in a bid for sympathy, but because it’s the best way I can find of expressing how I feel about the Queen.

Her absence yesterday at the State Opening of Parliament — just a small and woefully inadequate side table bearing the crown in her place — was the graphic,…