Royalist or not, the Queen’s Jubilee certainly proved a boon this weekend, with our local park hosting a specially organised free picnic for kids and families.

Not only were all of Jack’s best friends at the park, but there was free face-painting, a bouncy castle and a Women’s Institute cake giveaway for the kids.

Arriving an hour after the event kicked off, we were quite shocked at how many people had shown up. Spotting some parents we knew, we made a beeline for the face-painting queue.

Having spent ten minutes queuing, however, it quickly became apparent that lots of parents were holding places for three to five different children.

Ideally, we would have left the queue and gone somewhere else to sit down. But with Jack so pleased to see his friends and heart-set on getting his face painted, we decided to persevere.

Two hours later, still several children from the front, we realised what a bad decision this had been.

Narrowly avoiding the cut-off point arbitrarily introduced by the not-so-organised organisers an hour before the face-painter was due to shut up shop and go home, we breathed a sigh of relief.

This wasn’t to be the end of our troubles though. A clutch of disgruntled parents from the back of the queue, appalled that their child wouldn’t be getting daubed in wet paint, made their way to the front and attempted to start painting their kids’ faces themselves!

Granted, they were quite right to be upset – some had been queuing for nearly as long as we had – but even ever-so-placid me considered this a step over the mark.

Some people at the front came very close to full-blown parent fisticuffs at one stage, and there were certainly a lot of harsh words exchanged.

The funny thing is, none of the kids were at all bothered by any of this. Most of them were trying to spin plates with the nearby clown or – in Jack’s case – running in and out of everyone in the queue like a nutter.

In the end, fights were averted and Jack got his face painted, opting for his favoured butterfly motif rather than something more boyish like a Spiderman or tiger.

Three hours later, bored of looking like an insect, Jack insisted on scrubbing it all off in the bath. So much for all that time spent queuing up.