Is there much point left to the royal family? Not that I think we should get rid of them but I wouldn’t mind at all if I never heard another word about them. I don’t care that William and Kate have been on a ‘charm offensive’ in Europe. I don’t care what Charles thinks about celery. I don’t care what dress someone is wearing or whose sister with an award winning arse has just got married. I’m not interested in seeing Harry playing rugby with some starving Africans and pretending everything is fine. I don’t care if Philip needs an emergency air ambulance ride for a ‘routine check-up’ or that his wife has a very dim view of Theresa May (don’t we all by now?). Nobody cares about Prince Andrew or Prince Edward. And I certainly don’t care that Prince George is 4 years old or that everyone else thinks he looks cute on the front of the papers.
Being a friend of the royal family must be bloody awful. Being in their ‘intimate circle’ must be even worse. You might think that to have got there must mean you have lots of cash and a life of privilege that 99% of the world’s population wouldn’t know what to do with, but that doesn’t make it a good thing. Imagine sitting around watching a polo match all day and having to tear your face open with a big grin at everything everyone says. Imagine sitting like a prick for three hours in a church baptism service next to a pokerfaced tart wearing a swan for a hat and called Felicity Flixham-Dixon-Ricketts, hoping your face might be a blur in the very back of a photo on page 12 of the Daily Mail. Imagine a life where you may at some point be interviewed by Nicholas Witchell. Or Penny Junor. Imagine living in a house where the toilet reading is Jeffrey Archer, Hello magazine and The Lady. What a frightful fucking bore it must be, daaaahling.
When I was younger I can imagine I would have envied that kind of life but these days I’m definitely older and arguably fractionally wiser so when I see Prince George on the front of every paper I don’t think about destroying the royal family or anything treacherous, I just struggle to give a toss on any level whatsoever. My particular pet hate is anything related to Diana. I appreciate she wasn’t part of the family at the end and I don’t think she was evil or that she deserved to die, but for me she sums up everything that makes our royalty so achingly vacuous. How can you have any time for someone who considered Paul Burrell a household asset?
There’s a documentary coming out on ITV to mark the 20th anniversary of her death and you can bet it will just mash up and regurgitate all the usual vomit of information we’ve become used to. I’m not going to watch it of course – most of what we knew about Diana was very dull the first time around so there’s no reason to think that that will have changed. The only points of interest were her sad death and that Harry really should have a DNA test. Preferably on Jeremy Kyle.
Also to mark this 20th anniversary William and Harry have suddenly remembered some stuff about their mum that they’d somehow forgotten until now. The content of this memory flash is basically the news for today and that exposes just how lame this country has become. Here’s what Harry said:
“All I do remember is probably regretting for the rest of my life how short the phone call was.”
You can work out for yourself how bad that sentence is but I must say there’s really very little point regretting the length of a phone call. Some phone calls are longer than others and that’s life, if you worry about that kind of thing you’d spend 7 hours ordering a taxi. More importantly, with all the other shit going on in the world it should not be headline news!
Anyway this is all running out of steam. It’s the last day of my birthday week so I’m off to drink champagne in the garden before Pizza Express and Wonderwoman at the cinema. My memorial fountain runneth over.
G B Hewitt. 23.07.2017
On stupidity......and other causes for concern. 