The Queen's Diamond Jubilee: Happy campers were cold, wet but unbowed There were more tents outside the National Theatre on the South Bank. Women dressed almost entirely in Union Flag print reminisced about previous trips like old soldiers remembering previous campaigns. "I've done them all," said Margaret Barnes, a sprightly octogenarian from Waterlooville, Hampshire. Queen's 60th, Charles and Di's wedding, Anne's and Andrew's, Di's funeral, Queen Mother's hundredth, Queen Mother's funeral. I suppose you could say that we were royalists. This time she had brought her daughter and grandsons. It's about being part of history. My father was in the Navy, and marched in the Coronation, so I want to carry on the tradition. I want the children to have the same memories we do. They love it here, and they'll remember it forever. I eventually made camp outside Tate Modern, where a small community of tents had pitched up. A stiff breeze was rattling the bunting strung along the river and it had started to rain but while it remained a mild drizzle everything was very jolly. Teenagers from Aberdeen chatted happily with grandparents from Cardiff. They swapped old royal stories ("Harry smiled at me last year," "Andrew sent a pot of tea out for my mother in "86") and subsisted on a shared diet of gin, cigarettes and the odd sausage roll. But one by one, the stiff upper lips gave way to practicality, and they retreated under canvas. Except, that is, for the three redoubtable ladies who didn't have tents. They sat in picnic chairs, umbrellas gaffer-taped to the backs, their feet wrapped in bin bags, to wait out the 15 hours until the Queen arrived. As the rain fell harder and harder, they looked over the river, presumably wondering if they could dry off by jumping in it. "We're tough old birds," said their leader, Lynn Walder, from Sevenoaks, Kent. We've seen off worse than this. Mad, or devoted? A bit of both at least. I left them to it, retreated into my tent and settled down for a blissful night's sleep. I didn't get it, of course. Lying in a tent in pouring rain is like being machine-gunned by angry bees. And though unquestionably useful for pavements, concrete is less good as a mattress. Between 11pm and 2am I lay awake, making a mental inventory of beds I had known and loved, and wishing ten plagues on the bright spark who decided that modern tents ought to be, of all things, semi-permeable. Lights kept flashing through the walls; it was impossible to say whether they were lightning or incredulous passers-by. St Paul's struck 5am and I got up. The first of the day trippers were arriving. The campers greeted them with disdain, like soldiers being relieved by a bright new platoon. Lynn and her friends were still sitting there, impassive. I wandered off in search of coffee (scarce) and a loo (plentiful). "We're used to being the youngest people here," explained Robyn Gill, who had come down with her friend Zoe Veera from Aberdeen on an 12-hour coach ride, proving that it isn't just the old-timers who like to show they care. But it's important to celebrate our history, and it makes for a great story. How often do you get to camp out on a pavement? How often you'd want to is a question for another day. Eight hours before the royal barge passed, I realised what my fellow campers, and no doubt the Queen herself, have known all along. The Pageant's secret: that it wasn't about the Queen or the thousand boats at all. It was about us, the loyal subjects, on the banks of the Thames and our sofas at home, lined up to watch. Some of us more loyal than others, not to mention colder and wetter.