Does Her Majesty glow in the dark?

In recent days the ABC's UK correspondent was for some days been encamped at the ornate gates of the Queen's country estate (the size of Belgium) at Sandringham in England's remote county of Norfolk. The Queen and other royals had been meeting at Sandringham to decide what to do about one wit has called Harry and Meghan's "pseudo-abdication".

And so last Monday morning, Canberra time, the ABC's correspondent was able to report, reverently, that "the Queen looked radiant and relaxed" as she, Her Majesty, shimmered into public view at her Sandringham estate.

Description of the Queen as "radiant" is a cliché of royal reporting but it is a dear old cliché with a kind of dated charm. It is a heritage cliché, and needs fond looking after, careful conservation, and, like a vintage steam railway engine, an occasional working display.

To digress for just a moment, and speaking of clichés, it disappoints that journalists only ever report hailstones as resembling "golf balls". Hailstones, especially the big, knobbly ones, seldom if ever resemble golf balls and the hailstones with which God smote Canberra last Monday (for those of us, like this columnist and like Israel Folau, who know our Bible, notice an uncanny resemblance between Canberra's recent punishings and the Plagues with which the angry God of the Old Testament smites the sinful Egyptians) were all sorts of shapes and sizes.

The hailstones that biffed my home in Weston Creek were the size and shape sometimes of Maltesers or sometimes of Lolly Gobble Bliss Bombs. Later, arriving at the School of Music hard on the heels of the storm some of the hailstones there seemed to me sometimes the size and shape of cupcakes or (for there was an exciting variety about them) of children's fists or of McDonald's famous Chicken McNuggets.

To lazily only ever compare such hailstones to golf balls is to under-report the hailstones' sculpted icy variety, their freezing weirdness.

But back to how once upon a time all reporters always described senior female members of the Royal Family as looking "radiant".

The Queen and the Queen Mother were always thought by the media to look especially "radiant" whenever appearing after a period of illness.

And that illness, irrespective of what it really was, was somehow always what the Palace officially, tersely, described as "a chill". This added to the royals already considerable fairytale mystique since, only ever made unwell by chills, there was never any suggestion that they (unlike us commoners) had rank-and-file flesh-and-blood organs and body parts that could give their owners hell.

But it is so long since we've heard the word "radiant" used to describe a Royal (Princess Diana was somehow never "radiant") that the ABC correspondent's use of it this week had redeeming features. The reporter has done well to dig so deep in her cliché drawer as to find this dear old item (smelling faintly of mothballs) and to give it a nostalgia-stoking gambol in her royal reporting.

I wonder why royals reporters (including this columnist, busily reporting many royal visits) never described Diana as "radiant"?

I wonder if it was that to describe a young and beautiful woman (like Diana) as "radiant" might have seemed a little unseemly, as if in her case "radiant" was a synonym for "hot" or "sexy". Perhaps, to give off a radiance that royals reporters can see (although I have never been able to see it myself) and politely dare to report, the radiant royal must be decently matronly.

But although thus far I have pretended to find description of the Queen as "radiant" so quaint and amusing, it is time to throw off the disguise of a mild-mannered columnist.

Throwing it off I reveal the humourless and hatchet-faced republican-socialist that I really am. I intensely dislike the royal family and dream of a republican Australia in which we no longer find anything magical about royals, in which the ABC finds better things to do with its scarce foreign correspondents than make them await around the gates of pommy toffs.

My face imitating a hatchet, I hiss that it irritates to have any mortal think another mortal "radiant". Do the reporters who found the Queen Mother and now find the Queen "radiant" ever detect such a supernatural quality in any other woman anywhere in public life? Has the experienced ABC reporter who finds the Queen "radiant" ever seen and described the phenomenon in any commoner woman, even in a female Australian prime minister, even a supreme female athlete? If not, why not?

For this humourless republican it is the supernatural exceptionalism that doting royalists attribute to royals that so dismays. Covering royal tours I've seen normally sane people turned to wobbly, genuflecting, swooning blancmange by a glimpse of a royal they believe has, just by passing by, somehow illuminated, irradiated their drab lives.

Does Her Majesty the Queen, supernaturally capable of radiating a radiance, actually glow in the Sandringham dark as, Sleepless in Sandringham, she takes her corgis out for their late, late walk in the estate the size of Belgium? Do even the corgis themselves, given that they are royal corgis, give off an eerie gleam? I think we should be told.