A Jubilee weekend of rugs, rain and revelations Oh it was great! But you were like this," - he pauses from shaving my head, and bounces up on his toes, twisting his head, miming an attempt to see over the crowd's shoulders. But we seen her! Oh! She is wonderful. A Moroccan barber in suburban north London: a fervent patriot, enraptured to have seen his Queen on the river. It turns out he and his family went into central London again on Tuesday, in order to see the balcony scene and the flypast. It was amazing! Tuesday. Keith was called into work at eight in the evening, so I watched 56 Up on catch-up, rather than Horizon, which was about Venus in transit. The sight of a heavenly body, objectively huge but relatively tiny in contrast to the power of the sun, making its path across the heavens - beautiful. But I'd seen the pictures, and no matter how beautiful, Venus is a lifeless rock. I wanted to see what had happened to Tony the cabbie, my favourite Up participant. The shots of him standing on Bethnal Green Road outside the Salmon and Ball, where his dad did card tricks, or driving his cab down Hackney Road, caught at seven-yearly intervals, were moving, more moving than those of a more unearthly body in celestial transit. Tony is one of those men whose essential happiness with life was written on his face at seven, and nothing much in the succeeding 49 years, bar the odd marital up-and-down and the pain of seeing his youthful desire to be a jockey turn to dust, has changed him. He was the fixed point in this series, the East End altering around him in freeze frame. Tony remarked, reasonably enough, that no one had ever asked a single East Ender if they were happy with the levels of immigration that had altered his birthplace so much. His reward for this was to be called a racist by the interviewer, as though a Londoner owning a holiday home in Spain is equivalent to what governments have done to Whitechapel in the past 30 years. Despicable. Friday. We're all in our own episode of Up, caught in the viewer's spotlight at discreet intervals ("You're looking well since I last saw you!"); we're insignificant objects moving against a solar back-drop, miraculously capable, given the raw ingredients, of beauty. Perhaps an appreciation of this fact underlay the happiness of the Jubilee. Temporally limited, Earth-bound creatures can still be caught unawares by a big event such as the celebration of a monarch's reign, because it forces us to contemplate our path through life. It makes us aware, with something like wonder, of the essential mystery that the whole random show goes on at all. Monday. The rain's holding off... No it isn't, back under the trees, everyone... It's off now. Come on, get the chairs in the sun. Julia has marked off a pitch with bunting, and she and her husband got up early to mow it flat. Families spread picnic rugs around the border, plates of food are passed around, then more plates, then beer, and gin, and cava. Slowly, nervously at first, we start to talk to one another. The children are playing rounders; after a bit the men take over. A group of us, chattering, fall silent. And I say: it's amazing that Julia did this. Everyone wants to come together like this; but it takes a special person to set the wheels in motion. What's great, someone else says, about days like this, what's great about it is that you're, you know, you're allowed to be proud of who we are. A gentleman - a neighbour - offers me a slice of a cake that was baked and decorated in the colours of the Union flag. It's delicious. This is what it's like to be the opposite of lonely. This must be home, I think. We aren't loud, and we're damp: but we're British. And jubilant.