In celebration of the impending marriage of Charles and Camilla, I offer New Statesman readers my own autobiography as viewed from the royal angle.

My first interaction with the monarchy came some time in the early Seventies. It may have been the Queen's 20th anniversary of coming to power, although I'm sure that's not the right terminology. Anyway, she came to York and rode along the racecourse in an open-topped carriage. The primary school I attended was given a block booking of tickets, but these did not place us right on the rails. Our view was obscured by dozens of other kids, but just before she appeared, some concession was granted and I and my mates were ushered right to the front, where we all waved to her. Some of the returned waves, I reckoned, were generic, scattershot, while others were aimed at individuals, and I was sure that one of these came my way.

Afterwards, I told my father and other adults that the Queen had waved to me specifically, but they were all surprisingly unimpressed. "So what?" was the general tenor of their responses, and so my republican phase began. For example, there was an old woman, an honorary auntie we used to go and see, who had some royal china in a cabinet. I'd always looked up to this woman, but now I started to look down on her.

For the next ten years, the royal family went its disastrous way and I mine. In 1981, in my gap year between school and university, I watched the wedding of Charles and Diana on television. I was alone in our living room, and I remember being

annoyed there was nobody about to hear my witty observations.

By the late Eighties I was working as a journalist and, like anybody employed on newspapers in the late 20th century, I was quite oppressed by the prospect of the Queen Mother's death. Whenever I'd written a spread or some big feature, I was nervous that the Queen Mother would die on that day, thus deflecting attention away from the quality of my prose. In this sense I became, in a roundabout way, a royalist again. God save our gracious Queen. I really meant it, because the death of the actual Queen would have upstaged my own articles to an even greater extent.

Certain characters would be pointed out to me on newspaper floors: "See that bloke? He's editing a special supplement that'll appear when the Queen Mother dies. It's fifty pages long." "But he's on the gardening section, isn't he?" I'd protest. "That's what you're meant to think," I'd be told. "It's all top secret."

In the mid-Nineties, at about the time when Camilla was getting divorced from some man or other (my guess would be somebody whose surname was Parker Bowles), I was sent to interview Prince Edward for British Airways's High Life magazine, as I've mentioned in this column before. It has since worried me that I was sent because I was considered sufficiently sycophantic. Edward was perfectly nice, although drinking tea from a mug on which appeared the words "I'm the Boss". I couldn't help thinking that, if anything, I was posher than he. Which reminds me: when I was at university, an Old Etonian told me very definitively and without any trace of humour: "The royal family is middle class."

I was a married man asleep in bed the day the news of Diana's death broke. My wife, who'd been preparing breakfast for the children, walked into the bedroom, opened the blinds, and said, "Well, Diana's dead," as though it had been inevitable. This month also, I was in bed asleep as my wife, again preparing breakfast for the children, heard the news about Charles and Camilla. Again, she woke me up to tell me. At first I refrained from making any official comment but later on, sitting down at my word processor, I thought: "Good, there's a column in this."

So here's to the happy couple.