It was raining cats and corgis by the time I arrived in Finsbury Park last Tuesday, a fact that only served, given the dubiousness of my mission, to make me feel the more furtive. Everyone was rushing about, trying in the midst of the downpour to get their shopping done, to catch their bus or to pick up their children, and yet here I was, having bunked off work, intending to spend the rest of the afternoon watching a film about the Queen.
Would there be anyone other than me at the four o’clock screening of the late Roger Michell’s documentary, Elizabeth: A Portrait in Parts, in this shiny new cinema in one of the most diverse and most noticeably bunting-free parts of London? I pictured a couple of pensioners, handbags on their knees, but even they seemed an unlikely prospect.
