As part of the double bank holiday festivities to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, some of us were invited to the Palace yesterday to the concert held in Her Majesty’s honour. Unfortunately, it did not all go as planned.

In what can only be described as “mysterious circumstances” the Queen guitarist Mr Anita Dobson, who was reprising his role with his guitar solo version of the National Anthem on the palace roof, was unexpectedly consumed by what was believed, at the time, to be some kind of amazing pyrotechnic effect. From where I was standing, as Dobson came to the end of the second verse and prepared to segue into Rule Britannia, he appeared to be trapped in an incandescent vortex. The swirling column of bright white light then quickly turned to bright green smoke and the guitar stopped abruptly. At the end of the three seconds of silence that followed, the vortex suddenly disappeared and there was only the amplified sound of a plectrum and a tremolo arm falling onto the palace roof where Dobson had stood.

The guitarist had disappeared, for which he received a benused round of applause from the Royal Box, where specialists in emergency etiquette and Royal protocol spent the next thirty minutes improvising a ceremony with the tremolo arm, in order that Her Majesty would not be officially dismayed. All attempts to find the guitarist have so far failed, though a lingering scent of hairspray was detected in the Royal Standard when it was lowered later as Her Majesty left for other Jubilee duties.

Tags: Apocolympics