At the climax of the Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant, we lined up on the deck, the rain streaming down our faces, and waved at the Queen. The Queen and the royal party waved back.
And that, in a very nutty nutshell, was the story of the day. Two groups of people, divided by a common expanse of water, united in a common desire to ignore the elements and celebrate the glorious dottiness of being British.
For it is a safe bet that many who lined the Thames to cheer and whistle and wave were not ardent royalists. But they wanted to be part of a floating event that used a maritime nation’s ancient love of boats to celebrate the 60-year reign of an admired monarch.
The Times was granted passage on a boat called Wanda, one of nearly 40 vessels taking part that served at Dunkirk, pulling Allied troops to safety. Dunkirk: an extraordinary logistical exercise that many people thought was completely bonkers but that somehow succeeded against all expectations. No other country would dream up, let alone attempt to stage, the spectacle that unfolded yesterday.
Those who witnessed the pageant from the shore or on television saw what happened on the water. Those of us on board the vessels, oddly, saw little of what happened on the water but got perhaps the most striking view of all.
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We were watching all of you who were out there. We saw the banks packed way upstream of the starting point. Then the crammed balconies of riverside apartment buildings.
We saw Lord Archer on the balcony of his penthouse; MPs on the terrace of the House of Commons with their wine bottles lined up in coolers. Jolly fur-wrapped ladies at Chelsea houseboat parties; boys in baseball caps scaling trees; a huddle on the roof of a church tower; a lone piper at Battersea Power Station.
You cheered, roared and whistled. We sounded our horn. Someone on a boat near by played a bugle. The boisterous crowd on a boat close to us shouted “Oggy! Oggy! Oggy!” as they approached each bridge. “Oi! Oi! Oi!” the entire bridge yelled back.
You waved your flags and your hats and your arms and your children and your dogs at us. And we waved our arms at you. We waved and waved and waved.
It was exhausting after a bit, wasn’t it? Like being a royal for a day, one imagines. What exactly we were communicating was hard to say. It felt like a peculiar joy at being part of a common celebration that we all live in this little island nation surrounded by water and covered by cloud.
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Although for much of the pageant the rain held off, we had been expecting a drenching. Tony Farncombe, the owner and captain of Wanda, was adamant before we set off that the weather would change nothing. “This is very British. Obviously we would like it to be sunshine, but this event is going to be no different in atmosphere in rain or sunshine. That’s the British spirit.”
Mr Farncombe, a retired logistics manager, has been the “custodian” of Wanda, a motor sailing boat built in 1935, since 1994. “The spirit of Dunkirk is the little ships that were never built to go to war. The Dunkirk spirit took us through the war. If we hadn’t rescued those 300-odd thousand we would all be talking German today,” he said.
“The Royal Family have very strong naval links. We are a naval nation. The Queen represents the true spirit of this country. She keeps our identity alive.”
It may not have been quite the Dunkirk spirit that was required yesterday, but there was a certain stoicism as spectators put up their brollies and slightly reduced the intensity of their waving and those on deck tried to pretend their shoes weren’t full of water.
But as everyone peeled off wet gear and got stuck in to mugs of tea and corned beef sandwiches on Wanda, Mia Atkins, 11, one of her crew, spoke for all of us: “A chill ran through me constantly and I was shivering but a smile was stuck permanently on my face.”
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And as we moored at West India Dock someone suggested: “Let’s try this again in 300 years’ time.”