The Queen's Diamond Jubilee: We are all a part of the great flotilla of Britain You did not need to stand by the windswept banks of the Thames this weekend to reflect on these things. You did not even need to be watching the pageant on television. (Forgive a digression here, but let me just ungenerously remark that viewers were not assisted by the drivelling BBC commentator who referred to the Queen as "Her Royal Highness" - she's Her Majesty to you, as to all of us - and by the endless exclamations about how "fantastic," "dynamic" (Huw Edwards), "amazing" etc everything was. Why can't people paid by us to tell us what is going on calmly convey actual information rather than try to manufacture enthusiasm? Only the ever-admirable Clare Balding seemed to explain things worth knowing in a manner worth listening to. How I wish the Queen herself could do the voice-over on these occasions, then there would be perfect clarity and no bogus superlatives, just the odd "very nice.") You had only to be within a few miles of a place where people were celebrating. That meant pretty much anywhere in the United Kingdom except - sad to relate - quite large parts of Scotland. In Burwash, East Sussex, the village next door to our own, a man with the archetypal name of Eddie Workman organised a scheme by which pennies, laid next to one another in rows, would run the length of the high street. Collected, all those thousands of Queen's heads then went to village charities. In Whatlington, a few miles away, my father returned so late from the Derby that he had no time to change out of his morning dress before rushing out to plant an oak in front of a small crowd. It was a sapling from a flourishing tree in the same field planted by his grandfather for the coronation of King George V just over a century ago. In our own village, Etchingham, people had worked till four in the morning to reopen our community shop, which had been closed for a couple of years, in time for the Jubilee. On Saturday, we crammed into the Queen's Garden (inaugurated 1953). Sid the farm manager then put Colin the parish councillor on the hoist of his JCB and lifted him into the air so that he could capture all 250 of us on camera. Later in the day, guests came to our garden, because our house is the former rectory and the imaginative organisers had decided to combine the Diamond Jubilee with the 650th anniversary of our church. "Medieval" was the dress code, and so the lawn was covered with monks, churls, villeins, pilgrims, crusaders and ladies in wimples. Then we walked down the high street to a banquet in the church, itself a sort of monument to water power, since it stands at the confluence of two rivers, now barely noticeable but then the only means of getting through the wooded, clay-stuck landscape. Inside, the decoration was armorial and the whole hog was roast. The entertainments involved a jester in cap and bells who was able to wobble across the nave on stilts with a terrifying, brilliantly skilful imitation of incompetence. We drank toasts to Sir William de Etchyngham, who endowed the church in the middle of the 14th century and lies buried in the chancel, and to the Queen, who is splendidly alive, but no less venerable. Our son's American girlfriend was forced to support the head of Adam, the village minicab driver (dressed as a wizard), on her lap while the jester did a headstand on Adam's knees. We entered the church in daylight and warmth. When we tottered out, it was dark, chilly and raining. Could one honestly say there was any rhyme or reason to the various events described above? Yes, one could. It is a mark of civilisation to want to memorialise. Indeed, you could say that it is the first mark of civilisation. All human societies that have risen above savagery record their great achievements, remember their great leaders and honour their dead. By doing so, people establish their own credentials. We strike a balance between the fact that our own lives are usually short and unimportant and the fact that human life in general is very important indeed. We increase our self-respect while diminishing our big-headed individualism. Then we find that we enjoy life more and like one another better. For such commemoration, monarchy provides the excuse. Sixty years of a single, much-loved monarch does so in a better way than anyone (since there is now no one alive who was around in 1897, Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee year) can remember. Actually, the word "excuse" is not right. It is not an accident that children have always learnt history best when they have studied it chronologically through reigns. Nor is it an accident that teachers who want to attack our national narrative always want to take kings and queens out of it, and replace it with a series of "themes" designed to show that everyone except the rich has had a miserable time. Our successful monarchy proves something quite different. With Elizabeth II at the masthead, we cannot all be in the same boat, but we are in the same flotilla.