LONDON--Queen Elizabeth II basked in tributes at the launch of celebrations for her 80th birthday, with Prime Minister Tony Blair and others calling her a mainstay of Britian and the Commonwealth.

The Queen, who turns 80 on Friday, expressed 'thanks for our health and happiness" in a toast to 99 "birthday twins" she invited to Buckingham Palace for a lunch on Wednesday to mark their common birth date of April 21, 1926. The event, at the official residenc of Europe`s longest serving monarch, was like a fairytale come true for some.

"I nearly died when I found out I was going to the birthday lunch," Doreen O`Leery of Oswestry in west-central England told Britian`s domestic Press Association news agency as she sipped a sherry.

"I`m getting a bit watery. I`ve shed a few tears today," she said in the plush ballroom recounting how has had a good but ordinary life. "It`s something you didn`t expect, you know. It`s absolutely wonderful."

The lunch, attended by the queen`s husband Prince Philip, was among scores of events planned over the coming weeks to celebrate her birthday and the symbolic role she has played since the death of her father in February, 1952.


Queen Elizabeth--then Princess Elizabeth--shortly after the end of World War II.

A very happy 80th birthday to Her Majesty. God bless her!!!