Greg Dixon: Spectacularly different events

You can never have enough pomp and circumstance in your life. Even when mowing the lawns, ironing or wiping your nose, you should always try do it with a flourish, with spectacle and, if possible, in the presence of Beefeater Guards and a brass band.

Sadly, circumstances don't usually allow for proper pomp. But you should try. We live in a time where nobody stands on ceremony. We prefer to sit, slouch and sneer. We're the come-as-you-are generation but I think we all secretly love a good show.

For example, the prevailing wisdom is that more and more young people go to dawn services on Anzac Day because, unlike previous generations, they acutely feel the sacrifice of the fallen. Well, yes. But they're also after a little more pomp in their monotonous lives. They want brass bands.

Another thing you can never have enough of is the sight of royalty on its knees. Not in front of a guillotine you understand, but on its knees in front of us all the same.

So you can imagine my terrific excitement - and I hope you all felt it, too - at the prospect of so much pomp, circumstance and royal knee-bending last weekend.

But sadly Prince Charles and Camilla's wedding was missing the bums-out pageantry of his first wedding to what's-her-name, which was a veritable feast of what our secular, soon-to-be republican democracy is so sadly missing. Now that was a classy knees-up.

I'm ashamed to say I wasn't quite keen enough to get up in the middle of the night to watch it live. And having sat down to Queen Judy's highlights on TV One the following morning I'm glad I got the sleep.

There was ceremony, but I was buggered if I could find the pomp. C & C arrived at the dedication as if they were attending someone else's wedding and looked as nonplussed as they might at someone else's wedding. It didn't help the TV coverage that the commentary befitted day five of a drawn cricket test.

The BBC bloke said the "big question" was "what has the Duchess of Cornwall changed into" after the unseen civil service?

Utter rubbish.

The big question was whether Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe had gate-crashed his second do in two days, and was going to shake Charlie's hand - like he did at the Pope's funeral.

The answer to the BBC bloke's big question was the extremely uninformative "a long dress and a posy". This is what happens when you let straight blokes loose on fashion.

It got duller. The prayer of penitence sounded like it had been written by a lawyer. So did the dedication.

"Charles, have you resolved to be faithful?"

"That is my resolve - with the help of God."

It was only with the help of God that I kept watching. Though I hadn't felt like that 36 hours before. A confirmed atheist, I confess to being utterly moved by the four-hour ceremony in Italian, Latin and sundry other languages I cannot speak to celebrate the life and death of a Pope.

Perhaps it was the sight of the many millions in Rome's heart. Perhaps it was feeling I was witness to something straight out of the Middle Ages. Perhaps I'm just sentimental.

But I fancy it was being in the presence of proper pomp and circumstance.