You’ve got to hand it to the Brits, they know how to turn on a good show.

If you needed proof of that look no further than the journey south and laying to rest of a monarch who sat – at times gingerly - on the throne longer than most of the people referred to as her subjects have been rattling around the planet.

Love or hate the Buckingham Palace Firm, with its financially burdensome crew of grace and favour hangers-on, its flapping of garters on silk-stockinged legs, its occasional inability to pronounce the letters o and u in tandem (e.g. Camilla, where’s my trysers) and its love affair with horses and Land Rovers, there can be no denying its pulling power. Didn’t miss a beat!

The fabulously stage-managed cortege from Balmoral to Windsor, the kingly grasping of hands in Cardiff and Belfast, the extraordinary line of mourners standing for an entire day to troop past the Queen’s coffin, the chic black ensembles of the Firm’s women, the Vigil of the Princes, the funeral, my God the funeral; look, Baz Luhrmann couldn’t have done it better.

There were moments when little touches of Luhrmanism flitted by.

The Vigil of the Princes was top-of-the-range theatre, resonating as it did with any number of literary and mythical pretensions.

Close your eyes and you could have been steeping yourself in Arthurian legend or finding yourself transported to the intergalactic world of House Atriedes, such was the evocative nature of its title.

Instead we saw four members of House Windsor dressed in military and naval uniforms that might with the passing of time have become a little snug.

There were moments that gave cause for concern.

Camilla and Kate and to a lesser extent Meghan needed to have their skates on to make all those costume changes.

And they carried it off, right down to the last nipped-in coat frock and gravity defying hat.

The other worry was, how did those hundreds of thousands of people cope in queues that stretched almost to Lands End? 

If one of them needed a wee did someone hold their place in the line while they nicked off to find a lavvy?

Was there the UK equivalent of the CWA coming to the rescue with cups of tea and ham sandwiches? 

Was there a welfare organisation handing out blankies to stave off the cold? 

It was all well and good for us sitting in out comfy loungerooms but spare a thought for the brave souls who in best British bulldog tradition soldiered on to the queenly coffin.

In the end though, will there ever be anything to top that grandly operatic funeral procession.

Those glittering breastplates, those matching horses, those red-jacketed pall bearers, the pageantry of the procession along Hyde Park, deary me it was hard to refrain from standing up and belting out an anthem.

But I did my bit - when it came to paying respect to the second Elizabethan era, a gin and tonic said it all.