Mike Hosking: Mesmerised by the rock star royal family

Good Morning from London, where we are but days away from the latest royal wedding and dare I suggest as big an event as this country has seen for quite some time.

No this wedding does not have the constitutional aspects to it that William and Kate's did back in 2011, but the sense you have being in the middle of it all in the spring of 2018 is that in terms of interest it is every bit as big, if not bigger.

It comes as no surprise that Harry, according to this week's international poll, is as popular as his grandmother. Unlike all the rest of the royals, he is perhaps the most obviously normal and therefore the most relatable.

It also comes as no real surprise that this wedding is worth £1 billion to the British economy: the place is heaving, there is an air of joyousness and a real sense of pride given when it comes to these sorts of events. No one does it like the Brits and not only that but no one comes even close.

I stood on The Mall quite by accident on Sunday morning. The mall was closed, there were very few people around, but there was a changing of the guard at the Palace.

One regiment was replacing another. We ran into a former soldier called James, who at the age of 88 still follows all these events.

He took us down The Mall to St James's Palace, where the parade started. He gave us the history, he told us what was going to happen, how it was going to happen, who was involved, why they did it, how often they did it - and what it all meant.

This was not special because it happened every second day, but the police were out, the roads were closed, the event unfolded as it had done for hundreds of years, and in that moment that lasted perhaps 20 minutes by the time they walked from the barracks, up The Mall, to the palace, you could see, feel and understand just why it is that something as grand as a royal wedding could only be confidently and expertly executed by the good people of Great Britain.

What they can't control is the weather, this is not the warmest of springs, it has been beautiful this week and the forecast is still good but at 18C no one is going to pass out with heat stroke.

But then weather doesn't appear to affect the locals. We drove past the Natural History Museum when it was raining last Sunday and the queue was still at least 200 metres long - a bit of rain is nothing that can't be dealt with by placing a newspaper over your head (a wonderfully British and yet I would have thought completely futile exercise).

The documentaries are flowing, sometimes multiple versions on multiple nights, there is simply no excuse not to understand just how this love started and blossomed, who Meghan is and where she came from, why Harry is so popular and the Queen's favourite and how this new couple is going to further transform the monarchy

And that is perhaps the most important part of all of this - the royal family has never been more popular.

Between William, Kate, Harry and Meghan the future of "The Firm" has never appeared more reassured.

The only slightly awkward part of all this appears to be Meghan's family - who seem to range from odd to mad and perhaps a little revengeful.

What her father thought he was doing with the paparazzi and those photos no one seems to know, but the British press being what it is this week has seen the feeding frenzy go next level.

But by Saturday London time all of that will seem an irrelevancy.

Windsor is spectacular: the castle, the chapel, the park, the long walk. It is every bit as wondrous as any picture you might have seen.

They say there will be anywhere between 100,000 and 200,000 turning up to watch, hundreds of millions on telly, when it's all laid on this thick and this magnificently it is hard not to be completely mesmerised by it all.