BRITAIN: At one o'clock precisely cannon fire grumbled across the hazy waters of the Solent, and the Queen began her epic review of 36 varieties of cheering from the international fleet marking the 200th anniversary of the battle of Trafalgar. It assembled over last weekend, it will have scattered by the end of next weekend, and nobody present ever expects to see anything like it again.
The crews of 167 ships from 36 nations were on deck long before the viewing party was a blur on the horizon. There they stood, immaculate and immobile on a choppy sea, until ordered by a bellowed or whistled command to remove caps and give three cheers.
The Germans cried "Heil!", the Columbians "Viva!", the American coast guard "Huzzah!", the Finns something inscrutably Finnish, the Russians played an unexpected bugle salute - and Britain's marines, helicopter pilots, coast guards, and naval and military police muttered something unprintable as a light aircraft trailing an advertising slogan came to the very edge of the invisible dotted line in the air marking the exclusion zone. Ireland's naval service flagship, the LE Eithne, and the sail training ship Asgard II were also present.
The steep gravelly shore was lined 20 deep with spectators. Some were in place since dawn, and all morning a small army tottered towards the sea front, weighed down with quintessentially British kit of folding plastic garden chair, stripy cushion, vacuum flask and flag.
Their numbers grew steadily to an estimated 150,000, and many remained in place for 12 hours - through the review which began in brilliant sunshine, through the tall ships sailing past almost invisible behind sheets of rain, still there for the fireworks display which ended the day.
From water level they saw a review which resembled some vast marine jumble sale, of tiddlers like the Grand Turk, a replica ship of the line of Nelson's day, crossing the tracks of monsters like the French Charles de Gaulle which could have swallowed it whole, even in full sail.
From above, the whole event was as elegantly laid out as the graphics of a computer game: the whales anchored so they did not block the view of the minnows, so the warships, the minesweepers, the tugs, the dredgers, the tanker, the tall ships and the Isle of Wight ferry each got their clear view of the Lord High Admiral in the blue hat, an unruly scrum of private yachts neatly penned up in one corner.