Although I am not a huge fan of East Anglia as an area, I travelled there for many years to see Her Majesty the Queen when she attended the Sunday service at the little church in West Newton on the Sandringham estate. For me this was always my first royal engagement of the year and I always looked forward to it. I think I probably saw more people that I knew on that particular Sunday than at any other royal events through the year. It was always such a lovely event, even if it was freezing cold or wet, and we all enjoyed it.

There is a driveway alongside the churchyard, which leads to the church hall, as well as to a car park, and following the service Her Majesty always went there to present some Sunday school prizes - this created a natural walkabout, as she never used the car to get between the two, and there would be ropes along the side of the road where we would all wait patiently for the service to end. The arrival in the car was never any good for photos, it just established what colour The Queen was wearing really, and then we waited. Towards the end of the service the local police would invite any children with flowers to present to cross over and form a queue by the lychgate, in a very orderly English fashion, and when The Queen emerged they all moved forward in turn to speak to her. In latter years this was abandoned, as it took a very long time, and as Her Majesty was walking along the crowd she still met all the children anyway, rather than doing so separately from the adults!

This walkabout was always lovely and relaxed, with The Queen knowing many of us there and stopping to chat, and from the position where I always chose to stand with my son Zachary and my Mum we were frequently the first ones to speak to her and give our bunch of foliage from Mum's garden, as there were never any flowers. The Queen always inspected them to see what we had given her and several times I was asked what things were called, so I had to be sure to know! She also accepted a highly polished conker from Zachary one year when he was very small, treating it as if it were a gold nugget, and sending him a thank you letter later. We had some wonderful conversations with our Queen at West Newton, and when I was asked to go to a favourite royal place to prerecord a filmed tribute for her obituary that was where I chose to go.