The Queen has her value for being, if nothing else, a provoker of amusing anti-monarchist polemics. A good example of this is to be found in a recent article in the student magazine Cherwell concerning the decision by the junior common room at Magdalen College to spend £2,200 on a Diamond Jubilee tea party.

Ben Hudson, a classics and English student at Regent’s Park College, commented: “I’m sure the scouts on substandard wages will enjoy clearing up after the sumptuous party to celebrate Elizabeth Windsor’s knack for not dying.”

He added: “No doubt great fun will be had by all over the Jubilee holiday and it will all be explained away by the claim that it’s a fair price to pay for all the tourism the Royal Family are bringing in, despite the fact that Buckingham Palace raises almost no money, Windsor Castle isn’t even the biggest tourist attraction in Windsor, and the Tower of London has historical appeal that would only be increased if we beheaded the whole bloody lot of them there.”

Well said that man! Ben’s witty verbal assault on Brenda certainly demonstrates that the spirit of student bolshiness lives on in Oxford.

Forty years ago, this is the sort of thing I would have said myself, though probably not so well. Nowadays, I have come to value the Queen as an important and much-needed focus for national unity. How well she fulfils this role will be seen across the country in the days ahead.

She is — as the Rev J. C. Flannel and any of those tiresome contributors to Radio 4’s Thought for the Day would be likely to observe — an unaltered constant in a rapidly changing world.

For such as myself, born in 1951, the Queen has been a familiar, if necessarily distant, presence throughout six decades of our lives. Her Coronation is the first event I can recall. The sight of guardsman marching in tight formation is my principal memory of the occasion, viewed in black-and-white on the 14in screen of an Ekco television.

In childhood, as far as I remember, I never saw her in the flesh but working as a journalist in the years since I have done so on a number of occasions. The first time was at Peterborough Cathedral in the early 1970s when she distributed Maundy Money on the Thursday before Easter.

Of her many ‘trademark’ attributes, too well-known to need rehearsing here, none stands out more obviously on public occasions than her smile.

Spontaneous, unforced, sincere — it can be seen in every one of the pictures on this page. It is a smile, moreover, that inspires good feeling in return.

I saw this very clearly last Wednesday afternoon as I walked from Piccadilly Circus towards Waterhouse & Dodd’s art gallery in Cork Street. Passing the entrance to the Royal Academy, on the opposite side of the road, I found the pavement suddenly blocked by hundreds of motionless people, aiming cameras and mobiles. Through the gates passed a gleaming limousine preceded by six motorcycle outriders.

“It’s the Queen,” exclaimed the excited tourists, which most of them were. Unable myself to see into the car, I was equally inclined to accept the opinion of other members of the crowd that it was artist Grayson Perry — he of the fetching Bo-Peep dresses — doing a stint as bearer of the Olympic Torch.

As I discovered from reading the next day’s newspapers, it was indeed the Queen who had passed, on her way into the RA’s party for arts luminaries. The torch was by then in Cheltenham, well on the way to Cardiff (as I would later be) for an appearance there on Saturday.

Waterhouse & Dodd, by the way, is the home until June 15 of a fabulous exhibition, Life Lines, by the Oxford-based artist Angela Palmer, which will be reviewed on our arts pages next week by Theresa Thompson.

Meanwhile, a happy Jubilee to you all — and especially to Her Majesty the Queen.