It is 1977 and I am seven years old. The world is a very different place from what it is now. There is no internet, there are only three channels on the telly, and punk rock is new and frightening and strangely alluring.

It is also the year that the Queen is marking 25 years on the throne. We are not what you might call Royalists in our house, though my Nan Alice has a fondness for the Windsors that is quite at odds with the working-class life she has led.

Even at that age, I wonder what the Royals have ever done for her. I remember her carting me on a two-mile walk to watch the Queen Mother drive along a road quite quickly with the windows up and the doors locked. Afterwards Nan Alice sighs happily, “We could have reached out and touched her car.”

I do not realise at the time that this would probably have resulted in us being shot.

Anyway. 1977. The Queen’s Silver Jubilee. My other nan, Nan Annie, informs us that there is to be a street party in her road and I am invited. All the names of the children who are to attend have gone into a hat and those lucky enough to be drawn are to be assigned special royal roles for the street party.

My joy is unconfined at the news that I am to be Prince Charles. This is a disaster on several counts, the chief one being that I have developed a complex about my ears, which seem to be growing faster than the rest of me.

To have to sit at a trestle table full of children I do not know and pretend to be Prince Charles while everyone looks at me and thinks, ‘well, we can see why he got the job’ makes me want to cry.

In fact, I do cry. And say that I will not be Prince Charles. I think I attend the party, but definitely not as Prince Charles.

And that, I now realise, is where the seeds of my nascent republicanism were probably planted.

I did not attend a street party when Diana and Charles were married. I played football in my wellies. I remember that more than the wedding, to which I was called in at half-hourly intervals to watch, which I did for five minutes before running out again in my wellies.

My Nan Alice, who died last year, spent her later years in a complete about-turn on the Windsors. I think she finally realised that old Queenie didn’t have to live in sheltered accommodation, get burgled, eke out a pension and take her chances with the NHS.

So you’ll forgive me – or not – if I don’t get too excited at the prospect of Kate and Wills getting married. I don’t care. Or rather, I do care. I just don’t like to think about it.

A bunch of overprivileged toffs who think they have a birthright to the life of Riley makes me want to weep with anger and frustration in 2011 as much as the thought of having to be Prince Charles at a street party in 1977.