Queen Elizabeth has always been elusive and one secret that has managed to spill out about the most senior royal member has made her just the more mysterious.
It has been revealed Her Majesty has kept a diary that she writes in every night, since she was just 15 years old.
Monty Python actor Michael Palin said he learnt the unusual fact about the Queen while sitting next to the 93-year-old at an official royal dinner in Windsor castle.
The actor had just been given his knighthood when he told Her Majesty he kept a nightly journal.
“We were talking about diaries after I had mentioned that I kept a nightly journal of where I’d been and the people I encountered … she said she did too, the difference being that while mine may have been for publication hers were definitely not.”
He continued, “She commented that she found it quite difficult because it always made her a bit wooly and said, ‘I usually manage to write for about 15 minutes before my head goes bump’, and then she did an imitation of her head hitting the table, as if she had fallen asleep.”
Hugh Vickers, who is a royal expert, said the Queen was inspired by her father King George VI to start jotting down her own thoughts after she witnessed him doing so.
What makes this little-known fact about the Queen even more interesting is that her diaries are reportedly guarded tightly.
Not only are her close aides instructed to destroy the bottling paper used to absorb the ink from her pen, but her personal page is required to destroy the written-on paper so that the Queen’s thoughts can never be read.
“The diary is taken with her wherever she is staying, whether it be Windsor or Sandringham or Balmoral, and is kept in a black leather case – a smaller version of one of the red dispatch boxes containing Government papers,” a royal insider revealed to The Daily Star.
