Just get me out of the church on time

Baby Jonathan, double blessed and wetted, has just been expelled from school for drug dealing

Numbers would be well down, I knew that. Only a zealot would expect more than a handful of congregants to show up for morning service the day England were playing their first World Cup match. But at 10 o'clock last Sunday morning there wasn't one single person in the village church, not even the verger, and that's saying something.

It was the verger who saved our bacon when a friend's baby, my first godson, was christened – a lavish affair, six godparents, so many flowers you had to cut your way through to the font, and a vicar imported for the occasion from the public school the baby's father had attended.

So there we all were, elegantly suited and booted, baby Jonathan in the same hand-made Brussels lace christening robe his great, great grandfather had worn, standing round the font and no sign whatsoever of the visiting chaplain. Baby Jonathan grew restive, his grandmother started fretting about the tea being ruined, telephone calls were made and we eventually learned that the chaplain's car had broken down on the motorway but he was coming. We should wait. An hour later we were still waiting, the baby howling, his mother weeping, his grandmother apoplectic.

It was at this point that the verger shuffled up and said maybe he could help. He was qualified if that's the word, to do christenings. What a result, what a trouper. Twenty minutes later we were done and dusted and heading with relief to our tea when suddenly the door at the back of the church flew open and, like Carabosse, the chaplain raced in all apologies. We shuffled nervously. Someone explained what had happened, whereupon the chaplain became very red and shouted at the verger that he had no business interfering. As soon as someone lit the candles, we would get on with christening the child as arranged. That must be 16 years ago. For what it's worth, baby Jonathan – double blessed and wetted, received not once but twice into that blessed kingdom of peace and light, saints and seraphim, angels and archangels – has just been expelled from school for drug dealing.

Coming out of the church last Sunday we ran into the organist hurrying towards the village green. To celebrate the Queen's jubilee, he said over his shoulder, there was to be a united church service, Catholics, Baptists and C of E, in the open air at 10.30. It was a beautiful day, a dead ringer in fact for that poem that begins "Four ducks on a pond, a blue sky beyond...'' There was a duck pond and a blue sky here too, and a 14th-century pub and the sort of cottages you see on biscuit tins, all adding up to perfection – except, perhaps, for the burglar alarm that had just gone off in what used to be the craft shop selling wicker baskets and is now an Indian restaurant specialising in chicken tikka with chips.

No matter. The village green was full of people like Piers Plowman's Field of Folk who, instead of watching England vs Sweden, had come to church. The C of E vicar was wearing a straw hat, the man playing a flute for the Baptists was wearing a Hawaiian shirt. People had brought picnic stools and children took off their shoes and ran about. We sang a mixture of hymns, old-fashioned, happy-clappy with tambourines and "Jerusalem". In between, people from the village got up and talked about their experiences of either meeting or seeing the Queen. An old man said he'd been invited to a garden party at Buckingham Palace, he was on the parish council, hadn't been chosen to meet the Queen but got very close.

In his book, The English, Jeremy Paxman says that he once asked the Bishop of Oxford what you needed to believe to become a member of his church. A look of slight bafflement crossed the bishop's face "An intriguing question,'' he said, as if it hadn't occurred to him before, adding that the C of E doesn't lay down rules, it gives people space.

I am neither religious nor a royalist, but last Sunday on the village green if you had asked me to pray for the Queen for a week I'd have dropped to my knees like a shot. What does this mean? Was it the sun or the fresh air or the old men reminiscing or singing "Shine Jesus Shine" or the tambourine or even that rare commodity we Londoners don't see much of, community spirit, that softened my brain?

It was probably the burglar alarm at the Moti Mahal.