Your Jubilee options

“Shut up,” she’ll say, quite viciously, and then claim that they must be happening, somewhere, because the shops are all full of Union Jack bunting. “Who’s buying that, then?” she’ll say. “The BNP? We never should have moved back to North London.”

“You’re right,” I’ll say. “We should have moved back to 1952.”

b) Watching it on television in your front room, with your in-laws, still grumpy about the way the above sort of street party possibly doesn’t exist anywhere, and certainly not in, say, Crouch End.

That’s how we spent the royal wedding. Or rather, that’s how she spent the royal wedding. I went for a long walk with the kid in the pram after the bit with Pippa’s bottom had finished. North London was deserted, except for men in their thirties, pushing prams, thinking about Pippa’s bottom. We’d pass each other on the pavements.

“Left the wife on the sofa?” our eyes would say. “Me too. With her mother? Same. Very round, wasn’t it? Very firm. Very high.”

Or, c) Not having anything to do with any of it, while locked in a strange and passionate fury you don’t quite understand.

I’ve a colleague, a serious political thinker type, who stopped having any respect for David Cameron – as a human, let alone as a politician – when he read that he slept out on the Mall, aged 14, because he was so desperate to see the Prince of Wales marry Lady Diana Spencer.

“What a loser!” he is now prone to shouting, even in meetings about completely different things. “Who does that?”

It’s funny how people who don’t care about the royals care about the royals so much more than the people who do.

If you do manage to find a traditional royal-themed party, anyway, I’m guessing your behaviour at it will be either…

a) Exemplary. Thrilled beyond words. You will feel more British than you ever have before, and have a vague yearning to invade somewhere; probably France. “We should do this more!” you will think to yourself. “Rule Britannia! And I never liked the Sex Pistols. Ghastly. Now, I wonder who runs my local Conservative Association.”

b) Laden with irony. You will be dressed as the Queen, even though you are called Derek. You will refer to the monarch as “Brenda” and her husband as “Phil the Greek”. Perhaps you will have a dirty conversation with a neighbour you’ve always quite fancied about why “bunting” isn’t a verb and, if it were, how you’d do it.

Or, c) Drunk, because it’s a Bank Holiday. Because you’re drunk every Bank Holiday. You’re one of those people who is only really comfortable at Christmas, New Year, Easter and a handful of days punctuated through the summer. For you, the Diamond Jubilee is like a surprise atoll for a man lost at sea.

Weddings aside, the definitive royal event of your lifetime has been…

a) The tragic death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

We were away, staying in a backpacker lodge in Swaziland that was full of hippies and a familiar-looking man whom I realised years later was in Chumbawamba. The Swazis were very upset on our behalf, which was kind, given that the last king had 70 wives and more than 1,000 grandchildren, which meant that they had no end of princesses, and you sometimes met them on buses.

b) The expected, but also sad, death of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. We were away. A Namibian told me about it in a pool bar in Cape Town. “You’ll probably want to phone somebody,” he said, but I couldn’t think who.

Or, c) The Golden Jubilee of 2002.

We were away. Tanzania this time. It’s a bit weird, this. She is a travel writer, but still, we really don’t go away that often. To be honest, I don’t even remember it happening.

“You must!” says my wife. “We talked about missing the street parties. Remember?”

No. Anyway, I hope you’re enjoying yourselves. We’re in Los Angeles.

hugo.rifkind@thetimes.co.uk

Caitlin Moran is back next week