IF YOU’VE recently followed Andrew Marr’s three-part documentary on the Queen you’ll know that she’s an absolute diamond.

Love her – and most people surely do – be ambivalent about her or refuse to give her telly or newspaper room, the Queen has been a mainstay of how this nation is perceived for 60 glorious, and sometimes not so glorious, years.

She’s been there in the background of our consciousness for an awful lot of our lifetimes.

Whether you think the Royals are a waste of space and taxpayers’ money, if you believe they’re just a tourist attraction helping our balance of payments, or if you’re an avid royalist who thinks the likes of Oliver Cromwell should be airbrushed from the nation’s history, the Queen has and continues to be a central figure in our psyche.

To take Marr’s musings a step further, she’s there every time we buy a stamp to post a letter; she’s next to our hearts as we draw out wallets from breast pockets to buy a pint in the local pub; she’s a ritual at 3pm every Christmas Day; she’s there when the going gets tough like when a slag heap engulfs a Welsh valley school, a madman lets rip with a gun in a Scottish one, or home-grown terrorists blow up citizens in London; she’s there when the tough get going, the figurehead of our armed forces as they go off to war, handing out gongs when our athletes manage to do something record-breaking, and bestowing other gongs on lollipop ladies, teachers, charity workers and others of their ilk who make up the fabric of our society.

Then there’s all those visits and public engagements. In 2010 she apparently conducted 444 official engagements in the course of the year, which for someone in their 80s is a phenomenal work rate.

If you take that as a base figure – and no doubt she undertook more such commitments a year when she was younger – then she’s probably undertaken upwards of 26,500 engagements during her reign.

Which makes you wonder how many people she’s met, how many bunches of flowers she’s been given, how many curtseys or bows have been performed before her.

And it seems that everyone has a story to tell about her. I can remember as a 10-year-old in Beverley standing in a nervously anticipatory throng waiting for her to sweep through the medieval North Bar on a fleeting visit to the town.

We were all hugely excited, having walked in a chattering crocodile from school to take up our places, home made posters and union flags at the ready.

At last there was a verbal tidal wave of ‘she’s coming, she’s coming’, and then suddenly there she was, if only for a fleeting few seconds as her glass dome of a car whispered by. And so overawed were we at her proximity to us that our well-practised cheers died on our lips and we gazed at her, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, silently overwhelmed by it all.

Many years later I found myself among 4,000 others at a Buckingham Palace garden party as a thank you for the (very) small part I’d played in helping the bereaved and injured from a terrible spate of rail accidents, and against all the odds and without a clue how it happened, standing with my other half nervously waiting alongside 40 or so other people to be presented to her.

Morning dress-attired equerries kept us in position, told me to how to curtsey bob and then there she was, tiny, her cheeks as smooth as a fresh, unblemished peach, asking questions based on the quickly assimilated information about us given to her by the equerry at her side.

Animated, and becoming more so when she found out the other half had been involved in the operation of the Royal Train, friendly but formal if such a thing is possible, but making you feel just that bit special all the same.

For some with perhaps more republican-minded tendencies such reminiscence may smack of sycophancy, for others it may trigger reminders of their own experiences, for given the amount of engagements the Queen has undertaken over the years, millions must have them.

I’ve always been a bit of a closet Cromwellian, if truth be known, but whatever your stance, here is a woman who through an accident of birth and abdicating circumstance has unflinchingly devoted her life to her country and its people plus, through the Commonwealth, 25 per cent of the world’s population living in 25 per cent of the world’s countries.

And in a selfish world of me, me, me where service is a dirty word, that is seriously, jaw-droppingly impressive. Not to mention humbling.