I have been on the road these past few weeks, talking at libraries, bookshops and literary festivals about my new book, A Voyage Around The Queen.
Every now and then, I ask members of the audience to put up their hands if they ever met the Queen. More often than not, ten or so hands shoot up.
This confirms the estimate former prime minister David Cameron made in a tribute to the Queen: that she met roughly four million people over the course of her life, which must surely be a world record.
In Windsor on Sunday, two women told me they had each met her roughly two hundred times: they were lifelong fans, who used to follow her around the country.
Another member of my Windsor audience used to see her on a daily basis: Paul Whybrew, the Queen’s well-respected personal page, best-known for his appearance in her James Bond sketch at the 2012 London Olympics.
After each talk, I spend time signing copies. More often than not, people in the queue tell me of their own particular encounters with Her Majesty.
Their stories usually confirm one of my observations: those who met her remember exactly what they said to her, but seldom anything she said to them. It is as though her words were written in disappearing ink.
Not so her sister, the more demanding Princess Margaret, who liked to make her presence felt, and took a sly delight in making everyone feel awkward.
After my talk in Windsor, a man told me he used to work at Peter Jones, the old-fashioned department store in Chelsea’s Sloane Square, which for well over a century has been the go-to department store for the English upper classes.
They much prefer it to Harrods, which they regarded as a bit vulgar even before it was taken over by the revolting Mohamed Fayed.
The man from Peter Jones told me that Princess Margaret had once been a regular customer, and took pride in keeping all the assistants on their toes. She had, he recalled, once approached him at his counter and said, ‘I’d like to buy some stuff.’
As you can imagine, he was bewildered: the store has always had enough stuff, spread over eight floors, to rival Grace Brothers Department Store in TV’s Are You Being Served?
‘Perfumery, stationery and leather goods, wigs and haberdashery, kitchenware and food. Going up!’ as the theme tune had it.
‘Could Her Royal Highness be a little more specific?’ he asked.
‘Stuff!’ repeated Princess Margaret, ‘I need some stuff.’
It was only after more to-ing and fro-ing that he established that what Her Royal Highness wanted was curtain material.
He didn’t realise then – how could he? – that Princess Margaret had a hatred of certain words. For instance, she hated people saying ‘scrambled eggs’, and would always correct them. ‘WE call them ‘buttered eggs,’ she would say.
Another word she hated was ‘material’. I first came across her intense dislike of this word in a little-known memoir, Of Kings And Cabbages, by Peter Coats, a former editor at House And Garden, in 1984.
‘Tony Snowdon was having a mild argument with his wife, Princess Margaret, and, having lit a cigarette, flicked the match towards an ashtray and it fell into Princess Margaret’s brocaded lap,’ recalled Coats.
‘HRH brushed it off quickly and, rather annoyed, said, ‘Really, Tony, you might have burned my dress.’
‘To which came the reply, ‘I don’t care. I never did like that material.’
‘The princess drew herself up and said very grandly, ‘Material is a word we do not use.’
In another memoir, 25 years later, interior designer Nicky Haslam recalled the same event, but remembered that after Princess Margaret had reproved her husband for using the word ‘material’, she helpfully added: ‘We call it stuff.’
Which brings me back to my friend from Windsor. If even Lord Snowdon didn’t realise that Princess Margaret needed to call material ‘stuff’, then how could a poor shop assistant have known?
Unlike her elder sister, Princess Margaret liked to make people feel uneasy. As a high society woman once observed, ‘When royalty leaves the room, it is like getting a seed out of your tooth.’