“It’s a dream,” said Shaun Doyle as he surveyed the scene in the garden of Buckingham Palace. “I’m frightened I might wake up.”
The vast lawn was full of picnickers, some 12,000 people tucking into Heston’s chicken and Charles’s biscuits, acting as if they were quite at home even if most of them had never been formally introduced to the Queen.
“I think,” said Mr Doyle, 67, looking around, “that we must be the only ones from Barnsley.”
Still, very nice of her to invite them all, even if the picnic for ticket-holders for last night’s concert did involve the occasional quandary, with the ration of one drinks voucher per person. “It’s a dilemma, isn’t it?” he said. “Beer or champagne? We’ve got the champagne. It reaches parts that beer doesn’t reach, doesn’t it?”
However, there’s no point going to Buckingham Palace unless you can tell someone about it. “I want to know who I can ring,” said Mr Doyle’s wife Irene, “so I can say, ‘You will never guess where we are — drinking champagne in Buckingham Palace’.”
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Nor is there much point in going to the Palace if you cannot dress up. Mark Orford, from Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, was wearing a red, white and blue punk Mohican wig and a Union Jack shirt, while his partner, Keith Williams, had gone the whole hog with Union Jack jacket, bow tie, shoes and umbrella.
What on earth did Mr Orford think he looked like? “Probably a complete idiot,” he said. “But I don’t care. I wanted to make a statement. I’m very patriotic.”
The Queen was not the only one celebrating. Dolores Osmond, 59, from Holywood in Co Down, had applied for tickets knowing that the concert would be on her daughter Danielle Donnan’s 33rd birthday. “I was trying to think what to do for her birthday,” said Mrs Osmond, who wore a home-made tiara. “I said, “Would you accept an invitation to Buckingham Palace?’ She said ‘I would indeed’.”
Sporting a velvet Union Jack fascinator, Sue Kershaw, a police support worker from Kessingland near Lowestoft, Suffolk, was celebrating her 60th birthday. “I’m still catching my breath,” she said. “It’s absolutely awesome to be here. I haven’t told anyone at work I’m coming so the chief inspector is in for a surprise.”