The jubilee was celebrated across the UK, reflecting great respect for Queen

The almost perfect weather in the new city of Bangor for Saturday’s royal visit was a metaphor for the long jubilee weekend.

The crowd at Bangor Marina was so concentrated, as the Queen’s son Prince Edward and his wife, Countess Sophie of Wessex, that the visitors were almost unable to progress down the pier.

The earl and countess are some of the less prominent senior royals and yet bystanders were still delighted to see them visit Northern Ireland at this time on behalf of the Queen.

The Queen’s reign is so long that only people approaching the age of 80 have any memory of a time before it.

The monarch is almost a perfect antidote to the modern trend of expressing your emotions and feelings.

We know that the Queen is now constrained in her mobility but there are only hints about that fact. She was determined to appear on the balcony at Buckingham Palace and did so late last week, then again yesterday, but was unable to be present at other engagements.

“While I may not have attended every event in person, my heart has been with you all,” was all she said, eschewing self pity. Then the Queen vowed to continue her sense of public duty, which, aged 96, she clearly sees as a lifelong matter: “And I remain committed to serving you to the best of my ability, supported by my family.”

We know also that the Queen greatly misses her spouse. Prince Philip, who died last year, but still she presses on with engagements, as she as she has done since 1952.

The jubilee was in some respects low key, but not diminished by that fact. Many people do not go in for pageantry in the way the British public once did, and yet celebrations were marked everywhere, including across Northern Ireland.

Respect for senior royals is great, above all for the Queen. No monarch had lived to the age of 70 until the 1700s, let alone reigned for so long. We are beyond lucky that the first one who did was a person of Queen Elizabeth II’s character.