With a spring in our step, we really showed we loved the glorious old girl to bits

Thank goodness: we didn't let her down after all. In the sour and often schizophrenic week since the Queen Mother slipped quietly away, one sometimes felt that the British people really were as unmoved by her passing as the combined forces of republicanism and professional sourpusses would have us believe.

"Indifferent", "ambivalent", were the commentators' adjectives of choice, as if we were seeing no more than some mildly unpopular chief executive resign from a public utility.

But London proved differently today as the Queen Mother's coffin was borne tenderly to its lying-instate at Westminster Hall prior to the ceremonial funeral on Tuesday.

We were not ambivalent or apathetic. We showed that we loved the glorious old girl to bits. Showed it by lining the mile-long route from the Queen's Chapel with crowds as large as if this were the funeral in earnest, rather than merely a prelude to it.

Showed it, most of all, by abstaining from the hysterical weeping and keening that accompanied Princess Diana's coffin through London five years ago.

For the Queen Mother, throughout her stupendous life, was all about lightheartedness and laughter. And it was, fittingly, amid more smiles than tears that her coffin made its journey today.

I well remember the death of her husband, King George VI, 50 years ago - that haggard, conscientious man who, even in his lifetime, came to be known as "George the Good".

I remember the pall of darkest mourning that enveloped the whole country for what seemed like weeks. The BBC in those days had no doubts as to its proper response. All entertainment programmes, on radio and the fledgling one-channel television service, were cancelled in favour of solemn martial music or hymns.

How utterly different the day when his loving wife began her journey to join him. A morning as light and fresh as one of her own trademark sky-blue dresses.

In Hyde Park, St James's and along The Mall, the trees murmured with spring blossom like crowds at Royal Ascot.

Just for her, London put away its cross and chaotic workaday face and became once again the more gracious capital she knew in her young girlhood, when great houses in Piccadilly and Park Lane would now be preparing for "the Season", when nightingales perhaps really did sing in Berkeley Square and when the pervading aroma on a spring evening would be of horses.

No muggers or carjackers, no squalid, collapsing underground or predatory traffic wardens or graffiti vandals or spewing drunks. Just stately buildings, perfectly swept roads, plentiful policemen and lines of immaculate uniforms walking beautifully in step.

Even the frenetic mercantile greed that now goes on seven days a week was temporarily suspended, with many shops and supermarkets closing for the morning as a mark of respect. On the day of the full funeral, betting shops, too, will suspend business, though I'm not sure that the Queen Mother would wholeheartedly approve of that.

London, we sadly recognise, is no longer a place where a woman can safely wear her jewellery in public. But the Queen Mother flouted that grim modern taboo, as she did so many others, with a coffin surmounted by the Koh-i-noor diamond. "If you've got it, flaunt it" doesn't come any better than this.

What a gorgeous surreal spectacle it made, the world's most famous gem, sparkling in the crown she wore at her husband's coronation in 1937, resting on a scarlet cushion on the grim old gun that bore her.

None could carry her, of course, but the King's Troop, Royal Horse Artillery, entitled by her late husband to remain "King's" whatever the gender of the reigning monarch. No port of call was more congenial to the Queen Mother than the Troop's St John's Wood barracks, where the tough gunners tended her special private drawing room with almost feminine care.

This was not a funeral procession, nor - despite its undoubted gravity - an overly solemn one. The music, though far from celebratory, had the kind of lilt the Queen Mother loved.

The 1,600-strong procession moved with a spring in its step.

The Princes who paced after the coffin, in their blazing naval uniforms - all but landlubber Edward - were Royalty exultant. The Princess Royal made the first ever public royal feminist state gesture by joining the traditionally male party in Rear Admiral's uniform, with trousers. Even after all these years, why does Anne still have the ability to make one's heart sink?

Behind came the Princes William and Harry, but, thank God, with none of the heartrending anguish following their mother's coffin through the weeping chaos in 1997. The Queen Mother was especially close to William, who would delight her by taking her out for "private dinners" in his modest little car.

Right behind the royals, in a typical Queen Mother gesture, came former personal staff like her chauffeur, her chef and her "page of the back stairs", Billy Tallon, a man with a more than passing resemblance to Dame Edna Everage's creator, Barry Humphries.

Prince Charles for once forgot the stiff upper-lip he had to learn as a small boy of four or five. Under the gold-encrusted naval cap his eyes were red with barely controllable tears. One could guess at his thoughts about the grandmother who gave him such sheltering love and encouragement in an often cold and lonely boyhood. The little pot of jasmine he left with her coffin as it stood in the Queen's Chapel somehow said everything.

After lamentable initial fumbling, the BBC regained its old touch with coverage fronted by David Dimbleby, a calm, authoritative voice to drown out the philistine chirpiness of the corporation's director general, Greg Dyke.

On ITV, the alternative Dimbleby, Jonathan, was thoroughly upstaged by John Suchet, who combined sincerity with informativeness, reminding us that the Cenotaph, which looks so straight, is in fact gently curved "to direct ones gaze upward to infinity." The precision and timing were immaculate. Big Ben struck noon and the last of the saluting guns died away as the coffin reached Westminster Hall to be shuffled gently from its gun on to the strong shoulders of eight young guardsmen.

Behind it now walked the Queen, who has had a terrible jubilee year thus far, losing her younger sister first and now her mother, but the face that is so fashioned for sadness had a positive look today. As she told a group of bystanders in a rare personal moment at Windsor yesterday: "Mummy had a wonderful life".

And so to the catafalque where princes will stand vigil, just as princes did for George VI, George V, Edward VIII and monarchs back in to history. But even the solemn purple and violet drapes now seem somehow feminine, like a combination she might have worn to the races on one of those days when you could see her from two miles away.

Her spirit was everywhere, and long may it remain so - sunshine, gorgeous jewellery, the tinkle of ice cubes in a gin and Dubonnet, a scent of jasmine.