I waited… and waited… and waited. 

When was someone going to email me? Or drop a leaflet through the door? Or ring the bell and asked if I’d throw together a dish of classic Coronation Chicken? Or did I feel like taking on the notorious Platinum Pudding? Upon which I would sigh very slightly, and do my best to look busy and a bit martyrish, and say I’d do my best to find the time.

After all, Shaun and I had a made a considerable sacrifice to be in the country, pulling out of a long-half-planned trip to Malawi so as not to miss this momentous moment in history. When was it all going to come together, this fabulous celebration after two years’ deprivation (for those of us who don’t live in No 10)?

Around the beginning of May, the penny dropped.

No one was organising our Platinum Jubilee Street Party!

I couldn’t believe it. But then I remembered no one had organised a Diamond Jubilee Party in our street either, and we’d gone to the street of a neighbour, and did believe it.

Nothing else for it. I emailed the three couples we’ve known for a while and the newcomer Russian couple we met recently (there aren’t many privately-inhabited houses in our street: eight, ten and twelve are given over to a Care Home; and one to thirteen were bought up by a developer years ago who has souped them up, made them very smart indeed and left them empty).

Yes! almost all of them said.

Then we must form a Crescent Committee, I said, and drink some wine. So we did. Along with Katie from one of the flats, whom none of us knew but who had responded to a thingy I put through the door. 

Which, surely, is what you get from a street party! After all, given how few of us live here, we could easily have had a party in a garden – somebody asked me, Why hadn’t we? – but that Would Not Be The Point At All.

Turns out, there’s nothing to this organising a street party business. 

You have a drink together. Somebody says, shall we have some music? Someone else says, I know a piper. I say, I sing in a choir. I also say, what happens if loads of people turn up without food. Everyone says, we take the hit: corner-shop Sainsbury’s at the top of the street, after all, says Katie. I can do a 1950s playlist, says Phil. I’ll bring a pianist, I say. The Russians drink the wine and smile and approve it all.

And that’s about it.

The Council is very enthusiastic and helpful and closes off the street and drops off some notices, and Bob’s your uncle.

Apart from the bunting, which involved rather a lot of getting up ladders, and then lorries driving through and ripping it up again, and then getting up ladders again, and more tall vehicles, and dropping a weight tied to string from our balconettes and tying string and Shaun looping it up with the long pole that props up the washing line and all that palaver.

The most stressful bit of the whole thing was when Phil discovered, with only two days to go, that there had been a run on clotted cream and there was a national shortage and I was the only one available to nip to Waitrose and break my solemn vow taken many years ago never to go shopping in a car again.

And it was FAB!

The huge urn (once rescued from a school skip) kept the Earl Grey steamingly hot. The table glistened with homemade cakes. The sun shone. 

We became aware of the distant piper turning into our street, his kilt swinging to his step.

We sang madrigals and part-songs in the lowering sun. 

The spit-roast pork was done to perfection.

The Care Home provided a stunning platter of Royalist fruit.

And we could have fed thrice the number of people.

And the most delicious realisation, at around 9 o’clock when Shaun and I had brought all our tables and chairs back into our garden and put the left-overs in the fridge and poured a last glass of wine and I had kicked my shoes off, was this:

That party was exactly what my parents would have done.

The eclectic music. The generous catering. The glorious mix of unlikely people. A thought which gave me more pleasure and pride than all the rest.