WHAT makes British people British? Is it our weather? Sense of humour? Ability to queue silently? Fear of the shops being shut for a day?

I know the question of what is Britishness is a hoary old chestnut but I had a sudden revelation of something that should be on the list.

Bank holidays.

Why bank holidays? Because they seem to encapsulate many of the components I’ve listed above. They distill millennia of history and culture into a 24-hour drop of GB.

Let’s take the recent Bank Holiday. If you can remember back to the start of the week you’ll recall it was a beautiful day.

From Land’s End to Lanarkshire, John O’Groats to Jersey we all crawled from our beds unable to believe what we were seeing.

Two sunny days. In a row.

That’s the weather checked off already. No-one in Britain could believe what they were seeing. Michael Fish rubbed his little eyes and pronounced there would be a hurricane in sheer geriatric confusion. Bill Giles joined an apocalyptic cult and paraded round St George’s Square telling us the end of the world is nigh due to it not teeming down in 48 hours (and another British quirk – weather presenters as celebrities?!).

By the start of the bank holiday there were people in that unenviable position of resembling a rasher of streaky more than a human.

Rather than the light blue we all become in the months between September and June they’d whipped their winter togs off on the Sunday and now there were burned necks, rosy faces and legs that looked like bottles of Tizer due the owners of said appendages not slapping on suncream (has suncream ever been sold for full price at Boots or is it always buy one get one free?).

But that’s where the British sense of humour and stoicism came in.

“Not to worry Margaret, my skin is like a pork scratching and I think I can smell the back of my neck cooking, but it’s better than it being rainy eh?”

“Ooh it is Albert ... Albert ... Albert why have you keeled over?”

And so on.

I can’t believe that anyone sat in a beer garden on Sunday (you lucky things) didn’t say to someone else: “Better make the most of this. This is summer for another year” – and then look skywards thinking “please let it be sunny tomorrow.”

And then if you were sat in the same beer garden on Monday (luckier you – presuming you went home and hadn’t been there for 24 hours subsisting on a diet of foraged peanuts and dregs from the drip trays) you didn’t – and with a certain amount of relish because you were back to work on the Tuesday, say “well, they’ve forecast rain for tomorrow.”

That’s Britain for you – don’t admit that things could be quite good and then when they are, hope that they go rubbish again so a sense of normality is resumed.

The weather and our ability to queue met in a perfect storm of not being stormy on Monday.

Basically anywhere outside was mobbed.

And I don’t mean filled up through the course of the day as people decided to make the most of the weather.

I mean military precision with dawn raids by elite troops known as parents of small children.

Me and my partner – not being experienced in the ways of parenting – decided to go to Cannon Hall at Cawthorne. At 10am.

I know those of you with more parenting miles on the clock are thinking. And yes, I won’t make the same mistake again.

As we sat in our car with the minutes ticking away stoney faced waiting to turn off the main road we could see the battle hardened faces of those already beating a retreat.

Pale-faced Espace drivers with a twitching right eye having some sort of breakdown after sitting in a traffic jam as the sun beat down on them and their offspring.

Grandparents gently shaking their heads as they performed three point turns as some tiny noise machine in the back voiced his or her displeasure at having to wait/not having a wee/not having an ice-cream/the building of tensions between North and South Korea.

We eventually got in – after queuing patiently and quietly and making a joke to other people as we got out about it being lucky we got there early.

I would say we got an ice-cream but due to the number of people snaking from anything that sold anything chilled the best I could admit to is hearing the faint chimes of an overworked van somewhere on the heat-distorted horizon.

I’ve now made a bank holiday checklist so I can fully enjoy the next one.

It includes packing a sou’wester, flip-flops and a scarf to cover all eventualities.

We’ll be getting up at 5.30am in order to get on the road by 6am and get to our destination while the queues are still only in single-figure miles long.

I’ve got a list of off-the-cuff one-liners written already covering everything from weather and travel to a nuclear holocaust and the rising of Satan and his demons to walk the face of a hellfire scorched earth.

Maybe another trait of Britishness should be enjoying being miserable.