The Queen still brings a lump to my throat

Much to my surprise, a lump formed in the throat as the monarch ploughed her way through the promises of yet another government.

I confess to having another attack of pro-Queen feeling as she celebrates her diamond wedding jubilee today.

For so many years, through the torrid royal divorces and scandals, the constitutional arguments and the caesura of Diana's death, we have pondered what would happen after her reign. There was never a sense of urgency - it was more of a puzzle than a serious concern.

Nowadays though, her tiredness is more apparent, the struggle with fatigue on big occasions more visible.

You could hear it in her voice that day in Parliament, having to plough through all the political cliche's of the day: "My government will work for transparency..."

I do hope she enjoyed Jack Straw restoring the tradition of walking backwards down the steps to her throne: "Quite odd, Philip, there's this new Lord Chancellor who simply insists on going backwards. What is the Labour Party coming to?"

So much of what is important about the Queen is the residue of so many years of familiarity, uniting generations and types.

When I was eight, the same age as my eldest son now, I pored over a Ladybird book on the "new Elizabethan age".

It predicted great technological change and nuclear power (we're still trying on the last bit). Several decades on, we're still all Elizabethans.

Her qualities are those that are hardest to maintain over time: resilience, steadiness, calm and a kind of neutrality that presidential heads of state can never achieve, because they are essentially political and she is essentially symbolic. She has seen off 10 prime ministers, from Churchill to Blair (Wilson twice), and an 11th, Mr Brown, into office - for now. They come, they go, she stays.

I never met a PM who did not describe the moment they first went to the Palace as moving. It is the nearest thing a secular society has to a sacred rite.

The more I wrote about countries marked by instability, the gladder I was to come home and find she was still on the TV on Christmas Day.

It would never occur to me to go to the Mall and wave a flag but like a lot of people, I am just quietly glad she is there without wanting to make a fuss about it.

Perhaps we will come to feel the same way about her heir, though it will be a struggle. He is in one sense a precociously antiquated figure, and in another very modern - in that we know rather too much about his foibles and flaws. It will not be a painless change of monarch. But for now, as for the past 55 years, I do think we have been extraordinarily lucky to have the one we've got.