Queen Elizabeth II prepares to celebrate diamond jubilee

LONDON (AFP) ― Queen Elizabeth II started five months of diamond jubilee celebrations last weekend with the promise of pomp and splendor despite the British monarch’s wishes for restraint.

The queen will make a deliberately low-key visit to Norfolk in eastern England on Monday, 60 years to the day since she ascended to the throne after her father King George VI suddenly died on Feb. 6, 1952.

The visit kicks off a series of events culminating in a flotilla of 1,000 boats sailing up the River Thames on June 3, led by the queen in a barge decorated in royal scarlet and gold and adorned with flowers.

Palace officials say the queen has ordered that there should be “no unnecessary expenditure of public money” on the celebrations.

Underlining the calls for restraint, Prince Charles’ wife Camilla stressed that the queen “likes things very plain” ― and launched an appeal for a recipe to mark the occasion, such as the coronation chicken created for the coronation in 1953.

But Prime Minister David Cameron noted that the jubilee would cost a fraction of the bill for the London Olympics which take place in July and August.

“This will be the year Britain sees the world and the world sees Britain,” he declared, urging Britons to “make the most” of the opportunity.

The palace is keen to stress that it will be “business as usual” on Monday when the 85-year-old monarch visits the town of King’s Lynn and a school nearby.

The engagements are the kind she has performed a thousand times over the six decades of her reign, but that unfailing sense of duty is starting to concern her family.

As her grandson Prince Harry said in a BBC interview to mark the occasion: “These are things that at her age she shouldn’t be doing, yet she’s carrying on and doing them.”

The extensive program planned for the next few months comes amid a burst of renewed popularity for the royals.

The wedding last April of Prince William to Kate Middleton, watched by two billion people, helped the royal family turn the page on two decades which were punctuated by the disintegrating marriages of the queen’s children.

The queen will recall the highpoints of her reign in a speech to parliament on March 20, then her love of horses will take centre stage for a diamond jubilee pageant in the grounds of Windsor Castle over three nights in May.

Spectators are promised a journey around the world with “at each stop indigenous dancers, musicians, military personnel and horsemen ... joining together in a scene full of movement, color and sound.”

The Palace dismissed as “in bad taste” suggestions that the queen’s visit to Australia last October was probably the last time she would make the journey Down Under in her life.

Since then, her husband Prince Philip, 90, has required emergency heart surgery, but officials insist he will be at the queen’s side in a jubilee tour starting in March, although in a nod to their age it is confined to Britain.

The younger royals will fan out across the globe in her place.

The main diamond jubilee festivities have been scheduled over four days on June 2-5, in the hope of fine weather, with a special national holiday declared.

The queen will hope one of her horses can finally win the Epsom Derby on June 2.

The following day, it is hoped millions will gather for the “Big Lunch,” a mass garden party around the country.

The queen will sail up the Thames, whose banks will be lined by crowds, in what the organizers hope will be the centerpiece of the jubilee.

On Monday, June 4, 2,012 beacons will be lit on high ground across Britain and the Commonwealth, before a service of thanksgiving at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.

At Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee celebrations in 1897, a banner in the crowd proclaimed her “Queen of earthly queens.” Royal commentator Robert Jobson says Elizabeth II can now claim that title.

“In many ways, whenever you mention the words ‘the queen,’ everyone immediately thinks of Queen Elizabeth.

”She’s effectively, if you like, the queen of the world. She’s not only the queen of Great Britain, she’s the queen of many other Commonwealth realms, as well as being the head of the Commonwealth of 53 nations.