Much has changed since Jubilee 1977 but at heart we are the same - David Behrens

Certainly the building has survived far worse than a ham-fisted handyman banging bunting into its rafters from the top of a wobbly ladder. So it will outlast me quite comfortably.

I had volunteered for the job partly because I said I didn’t mind heights – that is an entry on my CV I may have to revisit – but also because I thought it might help me to fathom the peculiar fascination we have with these moments of national unity.

Forty-five years ago I doubted the word of my news editor when he told me that Bradford would be bedecked by Silver Jubilee bunting, and that trestle tables with jellies and sandwiches would be laid out along almost every street.

But so it was. Even in the midst of political paralysis and industrial anarchy, people had come together to celebrate something they had in common, or thought they had.

Some of the organisers of those parties remembered the last two Coronations, and there had been nothing like them since. Not even the World Cup final 11 years earlier had seen such an outpouring of community spirit. It was an excuse for a party but it was also a chance to celebrate one of the few assets we had left as a nation. We no longer had an Empire, but by golly we had Eccles cakes.

To me, it was a revelation. There had been no parties in the streets of suburban Manchester when I grew up. Nor was there fascination with the Royal family at any level; that was an obsession reserved for my grandmother’s generation. In that Silver Jubilee year she was about the age I am now.

Much has changed since 1977 but at heart we are the same. The age of deference has gone, yet affection for the Queen is as high as it was for her father. “I think she’s wonderful,” said my neighbour the other week, though she confessed to not feeling the same way about the heir to the throne – and her views on the heir’s younger brother are best left unsaid.

But if the spirit of 1953 and 1977 remains alive this weekend, it is tempered by practicality. Our village hall party will be self-catered because in an age of choice, jelly and sandwiches alone will no longer cut the mustard. “You can’t account for all the allergies people have nowadays,” said one of the organisers at the village hall. “And some people are vegetarians.”

Besides, health and safety laws have brought forth 23 pages of “guidance” for such events, including what to do in the event of a terrorist attack. There was probably also something in there about that village hall ladder, had anyone bothered to look.

Yet when all is said, we are organising and attending community gatherings this weekend because we still want to; because they embody an ideal we cherish. We may not be able to put our finger on what that is, but we sense it all the same.

The Prime Minister – who has more experience of party-going than the rest of us just lately – attempted to define it for us by announcing post-Brexit laws to bring back imperial measures: crown symbols on beer glasses and fruit and veg sold by the ounce. It’s an idea whose time came and went 30 years ago, and he knows it. They don’t teach non-metric measurements in schools any more and there’s probably not a greengrocer left who can remember how many ounces there are to the pound.

But Boris Johnson’s intervention handily illustrates the difference between today’s plastic politics and the genuine sentiment that underpins the current festivities. I was sceptical about that 45 years ago, but not now.

We probably won’t celebrate again on this scale until the next Coronation – and that may prove as big an epiphany for the nation as the Jubilee of 1977 was for me. Will we rally around King Charles in the quite same way, or will the views of my neighbour hold sway?

Either way, I fear my bunting-hanging days up a ladder will not survive another weekend like this.