I’m writing this on a green, dripping Monday morning, with the smell of spring rain coming in through the open window. Typical British bank holiday weather, though this is a bonus bank holiday, so we can’t complain. This time yesterday we were waking up to blue skies, blossom and birdsong (weirdly, waking in the night, I heard a bird singing at about 2am. Not sure if it was a lovelorn male trying to win some company, or maybe confused by the brightness of the full moon into thinking dawn was approaching. Maybe a mama bird, singing her nestful of babies to sleep.) Anyway, the contrast couldn’t be greater.

It’s been a weekend of contrasts and contradictions. I’m not one to look a gift bank holiday weekend in the mouth, but coming so quickly after the last one (in the manner of London buses) I was slow off the mark with making plans. In our house feelings about the coronation varied between cheerful anticipation, benign apathy and republican-tinged cynicism, but having all three daughters under one roof for a few days is cause enough for celebration in my view, and I love an excuse to ransack the cupboards for an impromptu bit of themed kitchen decoration.

I was also keen to invite my mum to spend the day with us. At 82, she remembers the last coronation, which she watched in the small and crowded front room of a neighbour called Mrs Postlethwaite (who, in our ledger of family history, takes a key role in this story then disappears, never to be heard of again.) My mum’s mother had died about 18 months before, and in the intervening time my 10 year-old mum had been sent to boarding school, while her dad remarried (the archetypal fairytale stepmother) and moved to another area where my mum didn’t know anyone. On coronation day, home from school for half term, she was sent down the road on her own, to watch in the only house in the village with a television. The room was stuffed to the gunwales, the few seats occupied by adults, and I imagine most of the kids sat on their parents’ knees or piled in on the floor with their friends, while my mum stood by the door, stiff with shyness, peering through gaps to get a glimpse of the tiny black and white screen.

We were keen to give her a superior viewing experience this time around, and one at which she felt much more welcome, but alas it was not to be. The scones were baked, the coronation quiche made (with extra eggs added, because really, two was never going to be enough to thicken all that cream, was it?) when one of the daughters developed a raging temperature and a cough that rattled the windows. After my mum’s prolonged hospital stay in December, it was clear that bringing her into a house of infection would be unwise, so I took round a mini food parcel to her instead. I know that the best seat in her own comfortable sitting room will have been a very satisfactory improvement on lurking in the doorway of Mrs Postlethwaite’s front parlour, but it was sad not to be able to watch with her. (And if the last coronation went on as LONG as this one, I feel even more sorry for the little girl squeezed into that room full of strangers, who was too shy to help herself to anything from the buffet afterwards.)

On Sunday, having picked up a prescription for antibiotics from the out of hours doctors, we left the sick daughter languishing on the sofa and went for a walk in a neighbouring village, where the main street was festooned with flapping bunting and music drifted across the fields from a beer-garden party in one of the local pubs. I had thought beforehand how clever it was of the people at the palace who plan these things to choose cherry blossom time for the coronation, as the streets and market squares of Britain look so lovely at this time of year even without flags and fol-de-rols, but a torrential downpour on Friday had stripped most of the blossom from the trees. In our garden there’s a soggy mess of petals on the lawn, but we came across a tree that stood in the centre of its own thick pink carpet, like some extravagantly-staged set for a fashion shoot. As we walked, I thought about my book, which is growing and taking on a life of its own, and about the whole coronation thing, which also has its own life, lived out in village pubs and at city street parties, connected but separate from its source in London, and the privileged, cursed, famous and flawed family at its heart. To us they are a backdrop, as flat as the lifesize cardboard Charles cut out I saw in Sainsburys, and this event was a little pin in the wide map of our lives, fixing a handful of snapshot memories of blossom, bunting, making quiche and being on hold to NHS 111 (thank goodness for them.)

Back home I made a trifle, though we’d all had scones and cake and no one was very hungry, but I’d bought all the ingredients so it seemed a shame to waste them. I realised, too late, that the glass bowl I intended to use must have been the victim of a recent decluttering purge, so my layers of madeira sponge, fruit and custard slumped forlornly in the bottom of a vast fishbowl-sized thing. I topped it with a scattering of forget-me-nots (only thinking to look up whether they were poisonous after I’d done it) and one of the least misshapen strawberries in the ‘Imperfect’ carton, which was all Sainsburys had left alongside the cardboard cutout king. It tasted OK though. Rich, old-fashioned, a bit nostalgic; nice, but a bit heavy for my taste these days.

It’ll probably be a while before I feel the urge to make it again