I have one policy on the royals: do not actively seek out information on them. I do not believe that I am going to learn anything particularly useful by following their doings.
But you cannot avoid finding things about them passively. In recent months the following facts have unwontedly entered my conciousness:
- The King has cancer
- The Princess of Wales was in hospital for a long time
- The Princess of Wales has not been seen in public for a long time
- The Princess of Wales issued a doctored image of herself and her children
- The claim is going round that the Princess of Wales doctored the image herself
My theory is that the Princess is extremely unwell and that the Palace is trying to cover things up. But why? Well, they can be a bit odd when it comes to Royal health. I mean the Queen one day accepting the resignation of one Prime Minister, appointing another, having a photo taken of the event with her standing upright no less and dying two days later is pretty dramatic. And is a little bit suspicious. You do get the impression that we are not being told the full story. A similar impression was given with the Queen Mother – as was – who was forever ending up in hospital with a fish bone stuck in her throat. Always – seemingly – on a Friday night.
And so with this. Do they really think that an essential part of keeping the Royal show on the road is maintaining an image of – how to put it? – invulnerability? Well, they’ve blown that when it comes to the King, so why maintain the pretense when it comes to the future Queen?
Maybe, they’re just stupid.
By the way and for what it is worth, I thought the doctoring was pretty good. So good that I couldn’t figure out what had been doctored.
Update 13/3/24 Top fact-free speculation here from Toby Young. Starts at the 57:53 mark.
Regarding the claim that the Princess doctored the image herself that’s not strictly true. She said that she occasionally edits photos but she did not specifically say that she edited this one.
Weirder and weirder. I’m trying desperately to avoid going down the rabbit hole on this one but they’re making it very difficult for me.
Nowadays if you don’t care about something (like the Royals or the trans debate) then you have to *actively* not care. Applied indifference if you will. Yes, it is extra work but keeping your mind free of unwanted distractions imposed by others is a matter of personal freedom.
DiscoveredJoys,
Ain’t that the case!
As to the Royal health stuff in general… I can understand the vagueness. I can’t think of anyone else who has the details of their health so assiduously scrutinised.
As to the “doctored” image… Well, it’s neither badly done, nor unusual. I use software and AI and allsorts to edit images. Everyone does it. If you have a phone like a Google Pixel you have a complete photo-studio in your pocket.
I live in NL at present and it was all over the TV news last evening here with some shows going into amazing detail on it.
OK, clumsy bit of editing for which the Royal media operation should be suitably embarrassed about but all this hyper-speculation is unhinged…
This must be the “circuses” part. 😉
I hope they make a full and speedy recovery to good health.
Frankly, old chap, I don’t give a damn.
For those who don’t care to click through, the image of the British King ( then Prince Charles ) plotting with worm-tongue, er, I mean Klaus Schwab.
As to ‘His Royal Highness’ having cancer. He probably shouldn’t have gotten !vaccinated.
Echoing Paul Marks’s comment, I hope that both King Charles and the Princess of Wales enjoy speedy recoveries from whatever ails them – as I do for any other person who is sick.
Beyond that, there is no bucket large enough to hold all the f**ks I don’t give about them. A skilled welder, or an accomplished seamstress, are both more-important and likely more-interesting than any one of these over-privileged and fundamentally-useless people. Sorry, and all that.
llater,
llamas
I think this is a bit of a storm in a teacup. Out of the list in the OP the only odd thing is the doctored photo, and I honestly wonder if there are any undoctored photos in existence today. I think the King has handled the situation well — being open about his diagnosis has apparently increased the number of men getting prostate checks — and that is a good thing. And PoW asking for privacy on her health seems a perfectly reasonable thing since it is evidently a very serious, and I suspect embarrassing, medical matter she is dealing with. I think she has a huge amount of good will, and has been kind and gracious and exactly what is wanted from a royal person, especially in face of the Duke and Duchess of Montecito. The photo thing was a gaff, and the royal household is stuck in the mud and tends to make these sorts of gaffs. But cut the lady a break. She is apparently super sick and her photo was a sweet one wishing people a happy mothers’ day, even if it was cleaned up a bit. That is kind, and exactly what we want from the modern royal family (insofar as we want anything.)
I’m certainly not a royalist, I mean the whole thing seems like a transparent theatre to me. But I think they are fairly benign, and, lets face it, British monarchy is one of the most stable forms of government in history.
And I certainly wish them both a speedy recovery to full health.
A welcome distraction from other news, perhaps?
I just don’t bother with “news” about the Royal Family. They are there and constitutional monarchy works, chiefly by keeping the political class in its place. Politicians can be annoying enough as heads of government, heaven help us if their ambitions to be head of state as well were ever realized.
Whenever I see the current political shenanigans our American cousins to the south are currently facing, this Canadian always thinks: God Save The King!
“A skilled welder, or an accomplished seamstress, are both more-important and likely more-interesting than any one of these over-privileged and fundamentally-useless people. Sorry, and all that.”
Yes because all your Presidents are such wonderful examples of well adjusted human beings……..
@JJM
Whenever I see the current political shenanigans our American cousins to the south are currently facing, this Canadian always thinks: God Save The King!
Your preference to shenanigans is marching lockstep into the worst kinds of tyranny? What with Canadians being so “nice” the image of an iron fist in a velvet glove comes to mind. Not that that has anything to do with the king.
There’s something very, very sick at the heart of all “celebrity culture”, which the royals are an expression of. Or, alternatively, the celebrity culture of the 20th Century was a manifestation of something deeper in the human psyche, something akin to the age-old legends of the Fisher King.
Don’t know which, don’t care. I remain vastly unimpressed by all of these things, whether you’re talking the artificial nobility of the entertainment industry, or any of these self-serving postulants to fame like Paris Hilton. There is something distinctly wrong with people like that, the ones who seek that sort of notoriety out and then behave as though they were vampiric entities feeding off of the “fame”. Having met a couple of successful members of this human sub-species, and known a bunch more who actually wanted that in their lives, I can only say that they left me utterly cold and indifferent. There’s something not quite truly human about them, as though they only exist in the reflection from the eyes of their worshipping adulators. It’s scary to realize that you’re only talking to a projection of what that individual thinks they need to be, in order to keep being the center of attention; there’s nothing “real” there, it’s all artifice, all fraud.
I did a little interaction with the AI world awhile back, and the thing that struck me was that I got the same feeling from those AI chatbots that I got from the celebrities and wannabes I’ve encountered, that there’s “no there, there…” The reality is that there is a gaping void where a real person, a real intellect would be, and all that remains is the periphery that parrots back what that remainder thinks you want to hear, in order for the attention and worship to keep on coming…
I think I’ve said this before, but just as I would not be someone’s slave, I also would not be someone’s master. Not if you put a gun to my head: You’d have to pull the trigger to make me take on a slave, just as you’d have to in order to make me one.
I feel precisely the same about fame and notoriety. There’s something very, very wrong with the people who seek that sort of thing out, and just as equally wrong with the throngs of the deranged who circle about them, feeding off the very same flaws in the human psyche. I’ve lost track of the number of people I know who’re utterly invested in these creatures of the darkness in us all; one of my most memorable was a German woman I met through her husband… She had an entire room of their relatively small military quarters devoted to Elvis Presley and all of his works: The room wasn’t a bedroom, any more, it was a shrine where she performed twice-daily devotionals. There were holy relics, and all the rest of the usual religious furnishings you’d expect to find, and she was entirely unaware of what the whole thing looked like to an outsider. I’m pretty sure that she married her husband in order to get to the US, and that a large part of his allure to her was the fact that he’d been born and raised in Memphis, literally a stone’s throw away from Graceland.
Really nice lady, a real sweetheart. Took great care of her husband, and I’d have said that she was an ideal military spouse but for that one minor thing, Elvis. You’d talk to her about anything else, like German food and cooking, and you felt like you were talking to a real person, a really, truly “real” individual. Subject of Elvis, however…? There was something decidedly “off”, and deeply disturbing. No idea what the hell was going on there, but I’ve talked to Catholic nuns with less devotion to Jesus…
All of this is something indicative of a flaw in humanity. We’re deeply vulnerable to charisma, even when we are the only ones imagining it. The more of it in a society, the less rational it is as a whole… I suspect that the entire issue is tied in with a lot of other phenomena of the “non-mind”, like the near-religious approach many take to their politics, these days. It’s quite as if we have to have something to worship, and when that “something” isn’t there? We’ll invent it.
I’m sure that some of those reading this in the UK will be made uncomfortable about the idea, and I offer apologies, but I don’t think that it is entirely odd that British culture after Henry VIII was so adamantly against the Catholic Church. Henry essentially hijacked all of this, and took it over, transferring the “drive to worship” from Catholic hierarchy and saints over to himself and his heirs. This explains why the “Papist bastards” were so thoroughly hated and despised by the English crown: Instinctively or by reason, they worked out that they couldn’t have the competition, in that there’s only a limited amount of “worship” in any given population. With Henry and his heirs taking on that role, well… There wasn’t any left to go around.
It’s essentially an utterly irrational part of the general human makeup. Or, so it appears to those of us who’re alien to the experience, possessed of a sort of autism when it comes to these things. I still have zero idea why other people do this sort of crap, and I wouldn’t go an inch out of my way to put myself at the feet of one of these characters, royal or fake “royal” celebrity. I have no idea what the hell is lacking in other people’s lives that they do these things, invest this much of their identity in men and women who’d not even notice were you die, other than that your contribution to the tax base wasn’t coming, any more…
And, having looked into more than a few pairs of vacant celebrity-worshipping types, I have to wonder which of us is more human: They, or I. I’ve always had my doubts about myself, given that so much of what you lot get up to makes no sense to me whatsoever, but… Who knows? Who can say?
What’s suspicious about a 96 yr old dying quickly after living a normal life just a few days before?
My 89 year old dad made me a cup of tea and a light meal on my last visit on a Saturday, and he attended a rugby league match that afternoon with my brother.
On the Monday I found him dead in his armchair with his half eaten breakfast on the nearby small table. He’d made a start on that day’s Times crossword.
No dramatic death. He looked as if he was asleep, with his legs crossed and his glasses still on.
@pete,
I think that the handlers for the royals have bought into the whole “Fisher King” mentality, and that they don’t want to admit the head of state is ailing in any way, for fear of what that would do to the public psyche…
And, if there are enough “true believers” in the population of the UK, that might even be somewhat true. Mass psychology like this is an unacknowledged truth, in it all. I’ve no idea what they think they’re doing, but… Maybe they just think that with the King diagnosed with cancer, the heir’s spouse had better not be showing signs of weakness at the same time.
Alternatively, maybe Kate’s figured out she married into a clan of alien space bats, and she desperately wants out of it all, now. There are all sorts of “interesting theories” out there in the tabloid press… Just pick the one you find most amusing, I suppose.
@pete, re: your dad. If you’ve gotta go that sounds the way to do it. Having lived a long life, dying during my favorite meal (breakfast) doing something fun in a comfortable chair. Good on him.
I fail to see how Photoshopping a picture is any different than airbrushing one.
@kirk: I thought the royal family were alien reptoids, not alien space bats.
@Matthew H Iskra:
Potato, potatoe, tomato, tamotoe… Does it make a difference? Space bat or reptiloid, they’re still inhuman freaks bent on world domination… Supposedly.
Me? I just think the royals and the rest of Europe’s vestigial aristocracy represent a really good thing to keep around, so that we don’t ever get the brilliant idea of selecting leaders by who their ancestors were. Judging from the number of absolute dolts I know whose parents were bonafide geniuses? I have my doubts about breeding superior leaders via birth lottery.
Leave it up to me, and none of these assholes would be running anything more than a tiny coffee stand, which they’d have to pay for. My honest opinion is that we’d do better selecting leaders by the lottery system… You’re a registered voter? No criminal record? Congrats… Your name goes into a hat, and you’re liable for at least a couple years of service in a government position. No more than maybe five, or so? Whatever is fair, and whatever keeps people honest. Forensic accounting before and after term in office, as well… You have questionable income? Ineligible. You have money you can’t account for, after term of office? Capital crime, baby… Straight to the wall, in front of a firing squad. Goes for your family, too… All of them.
Not really sure why we set up a system guaranteed to eventually throw up an oligarchy of professional politicians, but we damn sure did. That needs correcting, stat…
The rabbit holes on this one goes deep indeed, where nameless things gnaw the Earth. This Podcast of the Lotus Eaters airs some of them, and it is essentially around a recent tragic death in the Royal Family, and the lack of clarity allows these claims to flourish at what must be a devastating time for the bereaved.
The main thesis is a spin-off from the Hon. Toby Young’s third speculative theory (in the update). Arising from that is a claim that the Mothers’ Day (in the UK) picture (point 4 above) was a composite of faces taken from a Vogue cover from 2016 with the children’s pics coming from a city farm visit or something like that a few months back, which suggests that the entire picture was cobbled together, so is the media deflecting from the actual nature of the modifications to the picture.
That these hares are set running is a testament at the least to inept news management on the RF’s part.
The trouble is – if you’re too superior to bother with the latest instalment of The Royals Saga, you miss out on genuinely startling revelations like this, garnered from a clickbait royal story :
Notably, however, Charles was very open about why he went to the doctor (an enlarged prostitute) and quite candid about his shocking cancer diagnosis.
APL
As with Charles III, so with Kate