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EILEEN BATTERSBYponders Marge Simpson and Queen Elizabeth

UNIQUE AMONG THE most exalted matriarchal icons of modern times is Marge Simpson. Her genius is empathy; she is all mothers - harassed, caring, bewildered and always forgiving, most particularly of mindless husband Homer.

There is also, to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, her "endless capacity for wonder" - Marge has never been either complacent or fully passive. There is a subtle defiance about this frontiers woman, residing in a place called Springfield that may well be an industrial suburb in the mid-west but is in fact a generic America, and everywhere else.

Since her emergence with her family, initially in the Tracy Ullman TV show, and more formally on December 17th, 1989 - a date that will live on in cultural history - she has come to epitomise resilience having battled the school runs, the supermarket, post-mealtime carnage, and remember the garbage siege when Homer offended the sanitary collectors?

Marge represents universal Mom, a woman whose independence is expressed by her dense tower of blue hair, strapless, vaguely Gauguinesque garments, heavy beads and a disregard for footwear. She is also ageless. Her love for her family is palpable, not only in her cooing sighs but in those teeth-grinding moments when her maternal protectiveness manifests itself as she-wolf growls.

In Homer she has a fourth child as testing as her pre-teen subversive Bart. Never underestimate the pressures of having a high-achieving daughter such as Lisa, aside from saxophone practice, there is also the hidden fear that while Lisa is determined to save the world, failure to do so could well cost her her mind. This is a worry with which Marge, a lone parent in many ways - Homer being more of a child - contends. Then there is the baby, frozen in time, destined to continue sucking that plug-like pacifier into eternity.

Elizabeth Windsor is another matriarch, albeit shoe-wearing. Far wealthier than Marge, Queen Elizabeth II also shows her 86 years. She enjoys wearing yellow whereas Marge is yellow, a modified neon shade.

The royal consort, Philip, shares Homer's continuous-stream-of-consciousness approach to life. Reflecting on Elizabeth II's career, one could suggest that the true test of a great matriarch rests not in how one deals with tragedy but rather in how one confronts embarrassment, all of it.

The Windsor equivalent of Bart is an eccentric eldest son, the Prince of Wales, desperate to be Charles III but so unfit for the task that his mother has accepted that one can not retire. Tampons, divorces, financial scandals, unruly commoner daughters-in-law, master classes in excess and general bad behaviour, Elizabeth II has endured it all with the stoicism of one trapped in a dental surgery. She has ruled a troubled, changing nation for 60 years, quite a feat, although perhaps not quite equal to Marge and her family having survived more than 500 episodes of highly competitive commercial television. Last year's state visit endeared her to the Irish, while her subjects will celebrate her tomorrow as the Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant and 1,000 boats proceed through London to historic Greenwich.