Everyone enjoyed this year's extra four-day Bank Holiday weekend so much, the Royals are letting us have another in 2012 for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. There's a catch though - the late May bank holiday is being switched to 4th June, but we also get Tuesday 5th off.
Her Maj kickstarts the weekend with an event presumably more to her liking than standing around next to a pint of Guinness - she's off to the Epsom Derby (or has the Palace confused her with her mother?) on the Saturday, while on Sunday a flotilla of 1,000 boats will sail up the Thames. We're also apparently going to be encouraged to have Sunday lunch with our friends and neighbours, so we think we know the date of next year's Big Lunch...
The BBC will host a concert at the Palace which you can watch on telly if you don't get tickets in the ballot, 2,012 beacons will be lit across the country and celebrations will end on Tuesday with a thanksgiving service at St Paul's. Expect people to pack the route cos it's a carriage procession.
Now all the Queen has to do to grab the limelight back off those pesky grandkids is live long enough to see out her 60th anniversary. (That's not a treasonable thought, is it?) But it might be fair to say the thing that excites us most is a big exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci's anatomy drawings at Buckingham Palace next summer.
Photo by sinister pictures from the Londonist Flickr pool
