Thank you ma’am – for bringing us together again

Little more than a year ago, what happened yesterday and will continue today, would have seemed utterly impossible.

For if someone had told you then that in the first few days of June 2022 you would be sitting in the middle of your street surrounded by neighbours, enjoying a beer, a gossip and a welldone burger, they would have been laughed out of the room.

Had they added that virtually no-one would be wearing a mask, whether of the Queen, the Lone Ranger or the National Health Service, they would almost certainly have been sectioned.

Portsmouth, Gosport and their neighbouring towns have always enjoyed a welloiled knees-up – it’s in their DNA. There is a special bond which comes with living on top of each other in rows of terraced housing. It’s called community.

And as we watched the joyous street party photographs ping into our system throughout the day yesterday we came to the conclusion that almost certainly the pandemic had made those gatherings even more exuberant.

They were taken in communities more closelyknitted now than at any other time probably since the Second World War, or at least since the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. And Covid was largely responsible for making us far more aware of our neighbours.

You will not have been a reader of this newspaper for long before noticing old photos of street parties going back more than a century – there are one or two celebrating the end of the First World War; George V’s Silver Jubilee in 1935; VE and VJ bashes marking the end of the Second World War; coronation parties in 1953, and so on.

So, whether you’re a staunch royalist or an abolitionist, the Queen’s platinum parties will be remembered for generations for bringing us together.

And for that we thank her.