It’s not like everyone loves the royal family, explained the black cab driver, who collected me from Borough market. It was that they love the sunshine, and they love a party, and they love “getting pissed”.
“The wedding is an excuse to get drunk in the sun,” he said while morosely scanning the streets and complaining about the lack of foot traffic.
London was drenched in sun, gleaming like a city freshly rinsed. Crowds of people – many of them women in asymmetrical hats – spilled out onto the footpath in front of the pubs.
It was like Melbourne Cup day – but with the volume turned up to 10.
Brits will take a day off – and their tops – when there’s the merest hint of sunshine. But today, it blazed all day with warmth, it was a Saturday and there was a royal wedding on.
You would have said the streets were buzzing, had there been anyone on them – but it was close to noon and people were glued to the telly.
“They’re all watching the wedding or the football,” said my driver of his non-existent passengers. He was scheduled to watch the wedding with three other families – but at the last minute two of the husbands had made other plans. The driver baulked at the threshold.
“It would have just been me with the women, talking about the dress,” he said. “I’d rather work.”
But that was pretty much the main point of this national communal moment – to dissect the dress – all the dresses, all the hats, all the celebrities and what the hell was going on with Elton John.
In a country where Brexit is still an open wound and the politics still so divisive, the royal wedding, and glorious weather, brought people together.
At around 11.30 am at an ordinary commuter pub outside London Bridge tube, hundreds of people jostled into a courtyard trying to get a glimpse of a big screen. Bottles of fast-emptying champagne and plastic glasses covered each table. “Has she arrived yet?” asked one Tube worker in a high-vis vest. “Have you seen the dress?”
Even my grumpy cabbie conceded that this week the national mood seems to have been “really good – well, better than usual.
In the days before, Union Jack bunting started to appear in the streets and hanging off the rafters of shops and pubs – and near my Airbnb in Westminster, there was an odd, vaguely Day of the Dead-looking shrine on the street: torn out magazine pictures of Harry, Meghan and the Queen pasted on a wall and covered in plastic with fairy lights blinking around them.
Yet there a toxic narrative that threatened to swamp the collective buoyancy. The papers all that week splashed on the “Markle Debarkle” – the father pulling out of the wedding, the sister slagging Meghan off on breakfast television.
The stories and repeated use of the word “embarrassment” to describe the Markle family, hung like a pall over the whole wedding. How could it not make you think of what happened to Diana, and Fergie – the way that those women were pulled apart by the press and their marriages failed?
My cab driver dropped me at one of the country’s thousands of parties happening that day in parks, pubs and homes.
I had a brilliant day. The weather brought us outside onto the terrace and the wedding brought us together. For guests that didn’t know each other, the wedding was the ultimate ice breaker.
We hooted with laughter at the facial expression of the royals during the sermon by Bishop Michael Curry, were stilled by the gospel rendition of Stand by Me, and were disappointed by the restraint showed by Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie in the hat department.
The dress generated the most discussion. Half the room applauded it for being classic and classy, while the rest of us thought it was a bit ... baggy. Had Meghan been shredding too hard for the wedding?
“She has a great figure, and she covers it up with a dress,” said one disappointed Italian man, and fan of the actor in Suits.
The day wore on. I left around 5pm, and crossed the city. The parks were still full of day drinkers lying in the sun. Republican or royalist – it didn’t matter. You’ve got to make the most of it. These sort of days, sprinkled in sunshine and stardust, don’t come along very often.
• Brigid Delaney is a Guardian Australia columnist
