Please don’t call me a party pooper when I say I am not terribly bothered about the birth of Bill and Kate Windsor’s latest child. Of course, I am glad to learn that “both mother and baby are doing well” and that Bill, bless him, was present at the birth. And it was a great relief to learn that other members of the royal family were delighted to hear the news. No “Oh, for Christ’s sake not another one,” from anyone at Buck House.
Bill, who seems like a nice chap, said he will have “thrice the worry” now, a clever pun on the number of children he has sired. I doubt that he will quite have the worry of someone on more modest means, wondering how on earth he will afford the nursery fees or even luxuries like eating, but that’s the royal family for you.
I do find the whole thing more than a little embarrassing. The reporters, especially on the BBC, seem to be suggesting that Kate has done something unique and almost unheard of. Sky interviewed a woman who had been outside the hospital for some 15 days awaiting the birth and it had been “worth every second” to see the royal sprog. And two middle aged men, wearing gaudy suits covered in the flag of St George, turned up kissing dolls. This seemed to be going a little too far for my liking but in the current state of things in Britain today, I am in a tiny minority.
I suppose it does, for a brief moment, take our minds of the poisonous state of this country today. If we are not cutting ties with our European neighbours with the subsequent attacks on people with different accents, we are persecuting the descendants of the Windrush generation, seeing the rise of anti-Semitism and generally creating a horrible place to live. Perhaps this is a little light relief?
The memory of Princess Diana was never too far away from the minds of many today, the people’s princess who suddenly became incredibly popular when she died. It is easy to forget that for a brief time in the summer of 1997, Diana was hated by sections of the press (guess which sections), was vilified for going on holiday after holiday and leaving her young sons alone, to gallivant on a yacht with a Muslim playboy. The same media vermin who today spend their days muckraking, trying to find the “dirt” on Meghan Markle.
I never hated Diana. I admired her greatly for her tough stance following her divorce from her little toad of a husband, Prince Charles, almost as much as I admired her for her work with AIDS patients and land mines. She was, in every sense, a victim of the crazy world of royalty and the media obsession, fuelled by our hunger for royal trivia. The royals, the media and the public eventually chewed her up and spat her out. No one can be proud of what happened. Although she died in Paris, it could really have been anywhere.
The death of Diana reminds me that whilst I find the royal family an absurdity in this day and age, it is not worth getting steamed up about it. And if it is not worth me getting steamed up about it, it is not worth the media and the public taking leave of their senses either. They live bizarre lives in contrived non jobs through no reason other than their birth and their choice of partner.
Bill and Kate, like Harry and Meghan, involve themselves in good things, like Diana always did. I find it hard to relate to Bill and Kate but the other two – well, they have something about them. Either way, they’re here and they’re not going anywhere.
“Woman has baby” is not much of a story at all, is it? I am not bothered about the name although Wayne, Leroy or Winston would certainly set the cat among the pigeons. For reasons that are well beyond me, people really do care about this stuff and when Bill said we’d know “soon enough” the name of their latest sprog, I could almost hear a collective “Ahhhhh”. By then, it was time for me to go to the pub to celebrate St George’s Day over a pint of Irish lager.
Let’s raise a glass to the royal family. Well, you can. I just raised a glass.
