THE DAY WE SAW THE QUEEN

I totally forgot to write about how we saw the Queen on Saturday.

“What, in person?” ask most people at this point. So yes, to clarify, in person. Through a window, over the top of the Trinidad and Tobago Defence Force Steel Orchestra, and quite some metres away, but yes, with our own eyes, in person, the actual Queen.

It’s funny to think of her as history’s second most famous face. She’s certainly the most reproduced, appearing as she does on billions of coins and stamps. Everything at Windsor Castle is sort of about her, owned by her, to do with her, and surrounding her… and yet she’s really a little old lady, somebody’s grandma, somebody’s great grandma, far away on a velvet chair, listening to the sunshine rhythms of a steel band.

We were there to visit the castle. It’s well worth a trip. Glittering room after glittering room, four poster beds and tapestries and paintings. Suits of armour, swords and shields on stone walls, vaulted ceilings embossed with knights and carved into exquisite dragons and heralds. Well, I can’t do it justice. You’d have to go to see it yourself. It’s a place Sammy and I like a lot.

We were in the Churchill Room. It’s a room with weapons and bullets and things - and it just so happens to look out over the wide green courtyard at the heart of the castle. On the other side of that court are the Queen’s private apartments, and the arched gate that opens out to the front, to the Long Walk and the grand entrance. A policeman stood there under that arch, silhouetted in the sunlight.

We’d previously seen the staff pulling down blinds over the large windows, so when we got to the Churchill Room, we did wonder whether something was afoot. Then a Scottish tour guide whispered that the Queen herself was going to be entertained by the steel band before lunching with some people from the Royal Windsor Horse Show.

Anyway. With that prospect, we decided to hang around the window. Quite quickly a small crowd gathered, and we all peered. The steel band arrived. They set up their glinting pans and gathered for prayer. Land rovers drew up, protection officers chatted, and the smart pan players stood poised and ready.

Then, imperceptibly, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, the platinum sovereign ruler of the United Kingdom and fourteen other Commonwealth realms, history’s longest reigning monarch and supreme defender of the faith, bright white hair, walking stick, dark blue cardigan - shuffled out of her castle apartment, smiled and took a seat in front of the band.

Now, I get it. Not everyone’s a fan. Some people believe she sits at the pinnacle of a class system that grinds working people into the dust; others think it’s arcane to have an unelected family living in tax-funded castles and palaces, and would prefer a more modern republican Britain without them. That’s why, later at the FA cup final, hundreds of Liverpool fans booed their way through the National Anthem.

What’s great about Britain is that we’re free to express those opinions. In other parts of the world, public dissension is rewarded with execution. Here, we let the dissenters on breakfast TV for a lively debate.

And I think that freedom of expression is in part to our thousand year evolution towards a constitutional monarchy. And in our system, the Queen is a figurehead for the nation, binding us together, comforting and celebrating and defining who we are as a people of dignity, duty and compassion.

And there she was, enjoying the sunshine over Windsor Castle and the distinctive ring of steel pans as played by the Trinidad and Tobago Defence Force Steel Orchestra.

After a while, we slipped away from the window in the Churchill Room and let others peer out across the courtyard. We moved quickly through the mahogany rooms of paintings and marble, through the glittering gold of the Grand Reception room and out through the cold stone, carpeted halls. Before long we were blinking in the sunlight.

As it turned out, we had been in pretty much the only place we could have been to have seen what we saw. There was nowhere outside where the angles would have been right or that was open to the public. Every other window was obscured from the view too, either by blind, pulled down moments before, or by aspect.

We had been in exactly the right place at exactly the right moment. And that, I think, is exactly how I feel about being British.