I’ve just had an email from a friend saying she’ll be going to the Xs this weekend ‘for the wedding’. Whose wedding, I wondered? Aren’t all their offspring already married?
It took several minutes to dawn that she meant THE wedding – Meghan and Harry’s, of course! I hadn’t really computed the fact that it is tomorrow. I do know Meghan’s poor old pop isn’t going to make it after all (I imagine his heart problem has come as a bit of a relief – no one can argue with that). You couldn’t miss this major breaking news story. I keep getting these annoying and unrequested messages popping up on my iPhone giving me regular Markle family drama updates.
And I have sort of calibrated the fact that the combined forces of Fleet Street’s female commentators have it in for ‘The Palace’: that it is to blame for failing to do its prime-time Royal Duty which is to protect Meghan from her out-of-control family and keep them all in check. How on earth it is meant to do that, I really don’t know.
To be truthful again, I have only been told that is what they are saying. Honestly, I have not been able to bring myself to read any of this guff. All I know is that I feel very sorry for ‘The Palace’, and particularly the Queen, for the all-too-predictable nightmare they’ll be living through until the weekend is over. What did our gracious sovereign do to deserve another soap opera in her life?
Anyone who has watched The Crown, for heaven’s sake, must know that this woman beyond all women is a model of all the Christian Virtues. In fact The Crown is the best and only lesson in self-restraint that modern society has been given in recent times.
If ‘The Palace’ to blame for anything, it is for not protecting this very elderly – and in the case of the Duke of Edinburgh, very fragile – couple from this shindig. The only other option, apart from shutting their eyes and holding on, would have been to kidnap the entire Markle clan, put them in separate safe houses in Scotland, and on The Day assign each a personal security detail to stop an Ascot-style brawl breaking out at the reception. Of course ‘The Palace’ could have told the young couple to put up or shut up; that no, they couldn’t have their cake and eat it. That no, if they wanted the church wedding thing then they would have to settle for a quiet do up north, maybe the northern shores of Scotland, well beyond the reaches of the prying paparazzi. I am sure Prince C would have obliged. Doesn’t he have a house up there?
And you obsessive royal wedding commentators, wouldn’t you and the Hello! loving public have just loved that? Not much copy there.
Which takes me back to where I started. Am I the only one who cannot raise a spark of interest in the greatest show in town and will I be the only one on Saturday morning who will probably forget to turn her TV on?
Answers please.
PS: Really, really, I do wish Harry and Meghan well. Their dramas are not that much different from most ‘blended’ (broken home) weddings that are pretty much today’s norm. As my co-ed says in another message that has just arrived: ‘Isn’t this just a classic wedding of our times?’ The rest of us should count ourselves blessed that our families don’t have the horror of every detail of their dysfunction splashed on the newspaper front pages – and every latest instalment pinging up on the nation’s iPhones.
