Llywydd, in a remarkable life, the last 24 hours of the Queen's reign were amongst the most extraordinary. No-one who watched it unfolding will forget the sight of someone so determined to fulfil her constitutional obligation, confirming a new Prime Minister, something that only she could undertake, despite the unavoidable impact on her reserves of strength. Nothing more could have clearly expressed the overriding sense of duty, which was amongst her greatest characteristics. And this, of course, only the final service, the final image in an unbroken series of more than 70 years. Time will not forget the image of her sitting alone, in dignified and determined observation of health regulations, at the funeral of her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh. It is one amongst so many of the defining images of her reign.

Llywydd, in July of this year, on behalf of the Senedd, I had the privilege of delivering a gift from the people of Wales to the Queen to commemorate that Platinum Jubilee. Many of us here will know already about the Pontfadog oak, a tree that had stood on Cilcochwyn farm in the Ceiriog valley, possibly for as long as 1,200 years. It was uprooted in the great storm of 2013, but miraculously, thanks to the astonishing skills of specialist staff at the great gardens of Kew, five new oak trees, each one identically genetically the same as the original, have been coaxed back into life. Here, in our own maturing botanical gardens in sir Gâr, resplendent in the July sunshine, these new oaks were prepared for their new destinies: some to stay at Llanarthne, one to be planted at our own COVID memorial woodland in north Wales, and one to be established as a Jubilee gift at Chirk castle, the closest castle in Wales to the site of the Pontfadog oak itself. Enduring through the ages, an apparently permanent part of our lives, offering shelter and sustenance beneath its enormous boughs, there is a real sense of unity between this gift from the people of Wales and the life it honoured and celebrated. And a sense of the future, Llywydd, too, because the new Pontfadog oak was received on behalf of the Queen by the then Prince of Wales, today's King Charles III. Now as it takes root, it will stretch forward into a new life of service and one with particular affiliations to Wales.