Only once did I make a half-hearted attempt at embracing my dormant national pride. I threw a Golden Jubilee party a few years back and got terribly overexcited at the idea of decorating my whole house for the bash. I hung union jacks all over and assembled the naffest memorabilia strategically on mantelpieces in the entrance hall.

Everyone remembers the Queen Mother lookalike respectfully arranged on an armchair outside my front door. She looked marvellously regal, attired in my late grandmother's white quilted satin evening coat, gloves and black suede boots. She sat majestically scaring guests as they walked up the the candle-lit garden. In the early hours, they ended up sitting disrespectfully in her lap, spilling cheap Rioja on her finery.

As a teenager, I had a scrape with royalty. At boarding school I was often placed in the choir next to a square bespectacled girl with dead straight hair. There was a rumour that this nobody was in fact a huge somebody, related to the Queen Mother. I never quite believed it but in later years I realised her surname said it all.

Then in my twenties I was honoured with an invitation to a Buckingham Palace garden party with my parents. I annoyingly took my mother's advice on appropriate attire and ended up looking heinously flowery, complete with hideous fruity hat. Hundreds of guests thronged the palace garden straining to catch a glimpse of the Queen, Prince Charles and even the ethereal Princess Diana as they ambled around the lake shaking hands. I irreverently headed straight for the champagne and strawberries tent.

I once had a Greek boyfriend who I rowed and rowed with. He thought it preposterous and antiquated to uphold the institution of the monarchy, and unjust that one family should be lavished with such unequal privileges. I thought that, as a banker with a vast annual bonus pouring in, he should be balancing inequalities closer to home on a poor impoverished freelance journalist like myself. We rowed over that, too.

Last week, for the first time in my whole life, however, I felt that shuzzy zingy feeling known as Royal Influenza. I had an invitation for dinner and later a spot of dancing at a popular night spot. The host had placed me between two incredibly attractive Argentinean polo players. My ecstasy morphed to fury though when I discovered that both were under 25 years old and one was already engaged.

It is absolutely torturous and frankly a complete waste of my time and energy to invest anything beyond playful banter with these sort of guys. I no longer want vacuous flings, but no one seems to get it. I gazed enviously at women further down the long table, who had more considerately been sat next to prosperous looking older men. Later I collared my host and hissed at him for his annoying placement. Completely surprised, he replied: "But they are the best looking men here." He just doesn't get it either.

At the end of the meal I ran downstairs to reapply lip gloss and the rest before decamping to the club. As I was good deal older than most of the women, it was not surprising it took me a little longer to achieve passable results. On bounding back upstairs I was stunned to find that all 19 of my fellow guests had miraculously disappeared. Rumpled napkins and discarded chairs were all that were left of the buzzing dinner party.

Brilliant. Not one person had waited for me. Just showed how vital I was to this occasion. I debated over going home in a huff, but thought otherwise. Queuing among rosy-cheeked teenagers outside the club didn't improve my mood either. By the time I managed to get past the bitch of a door lady, half my age, I was seeing red.

But all anger evaporated as I found myself elbowing past the lanky Prince William and lovely Kate Middleton snogging and jigging away on the dance floor. I nearly fainted, but instead just stared ... and stared. I kept repositioning myself around the dance floor gazing at them from different angles. I had to restrain myself from going up to him and giving him a good snog myself, but there were too many threatening bodyguards reading my mind out of the shadows. It would be such a great story to tell the mythical grandchildren. "Yes children I snogged the King of England." I just wasn't in the mood to be thrown in the slammer that night.

For days afterwards it has haunted me. And now all I can do is wish that I was Kate Middleton, a nobody, snatched up by a real gorgeous Prince. It is a fairytale. I do begin to wonder when my prince will come...

Single in the city: e-mail Xanadu here

Times Recommends

• Treat Africans as part of the human jigsaw
• Too bitter a pill for me to swallow
• This Bill is a panic measure in a tarnished age