The agreed national line on the royal wedding is: "Good luck to the youngsters, I hope they're happy, but I'm not very interested."
That is what everybody says. The engagement was announced to a roar of benevolent apathy. I have encountered neither republican fervour nor royalist excitement since this whole thing began, only a vague and indifferent goodwill.
I expect there'll be a large audience on Friday, just because it's on TV and most people are off work. There may even be an outbreak of cheerful, faintly ironic street parties. Still, nobody admits really to caring one way or the other.
That is not how I feel. I am extremely excited. I shall be up at dawn (an eventuality rarely achieved without a neighbour's drill) so as not to miss a second of the coverage.
I won't be one of those lightweights tuning in for the service alone. I'll be in the front of the television in my pyjamas hours before the start, demanding to hear canapés and fascinators debated as if they were troop movements in Libya. I want to see diagrams of the route and colour charts anticipating the Queen's hat. I want to be reminded that Kate is travelling from the royal suite of the Goring Hotel with its original 19th-century lavatory by Thomas Crapper. (It was puzzling that the Sun reported this without even attempting a throne joke).
Having said that, I struggle to feel a massive excitement about Kate Middleton herself. It's the main royal family I want to see, gathered in all its bizarre, comical glory. My hunger for them will never be sated.
I want the Queen, tiny and beaming in peach, escorted by the 200-year-old Duke of Edinburgh.
I want Princess Anne, grudgingly buttoned into a skirt suit she's been wearing since 1973.
I want Prince Charles, arriving a careful two minutes after his lesser siblings but five minutes before Her Majesty, in a vintage Bentley tweaked to run on apple juice.
I want Prince Andrew, fivers tumbling out of his back pocket, tricked into attending on the promise that Westminster Abbey has a golf course.
I want Prince Edward, just because it's always hilarious to remember he exists.
How could anyone not be gripped by this roadshow? It's the gift that keeps on giving. I've tried to be a republican but, like trying to drink coffee, I can't make it stick. I was born preferring tea – and biscuits from a tin with the Queen Mother's face on it.
When I hear Colin Firth, a chap whose general sympathies are not unlike mine, revealing that he doesn't support the monarchy, I think: "Come on, Coren! That's where you should stand! Equality for all! Citizenship not subjection!"
But I just can't. Colour and sparkle are too attractive to my magpie gaze, and history is too romantic. I can't blind myself to their appeal. I'd be bored and cross if they were gone.
True, I grew up in a golden age for the royal soap: leaked affairs, tapped phones, endless scandal and shock divorce. This family will loom large for schoolchildren of the future, fat with memorability like Henry VIII. Their private scandals were conducted in parallel with an undeniable sense of public duty: that tension is fascinating, it's operatic. They are just never boring. They're so… not Dutch.
The royal wedding is a rare chance to see them clustered together in one delicious, historical, televised hit. The Windsor safari park in your very own home! How can anyone claim indifference?
My theory was that the bride in the centre just doesn't inspire strong feeling. Kate Middleton is neither a fairytale countess nor a fairytale commoner. She is a bit like us (no title, clothes from Jigsaw) and not at all like us (stunning, super-wealthy, no job), therefore we can neither root for our home girl nor be intrigued by her mysterious aristocracy.
Besides, a nine-year courtship is undramatic, unthrilling. People weren't hooked by the story, I theorised, so they just put it down after a few chapters, much as I did with We Need To Talk About Kevin.
"You're quite wrong," a friend of mine said the other day. "The reason nobody is showing any interest is because we're all so embarrassed by the Diana business."
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