Royal Indifference

On 31 August 1997, we were staying at my mother-in-law’s house in a little village in upper Alsace, France. 

I stress ‘France’ because of the widespread confusion over whether Alsace is in Germany, a confusion the Germans spectacularly shared on three occasions between 1870 and 1945.

Friends of ours from England were staying in a hotel nearby and joined us for breakfast. Their first words as they came in were ‘do you know about Princess Di?’

We hadn’t heard about her death in a car crash that morning.

In a matter of instants I travelled from incredulity to grief. And that grief led me straight back to incredulity. Why on earth was I so upset?

After all, not a week earlier we had been royally dismissing her highness. She’d been on holiday in a seaside villa where she had complained vociferously about being photographed from boats on the bay and had then chosen to sunbathe on the roof of the house, in about as perfect a position for the photographers as any imaginable.

It seemed an odd way to avoid publicity.

And yet I mourned her death. As did most of my countrymen, though some went a lot further in their grief than I was prepared to follow them.

I never went down to St James’s House to lay flowers. I really couldn’t work up any enthusiasm over whether the Queen had flown a flag at half mast or not. I couldn’t get passionate about Tony Blair’s intense reaction to the event, which I assumed had owed a great deal to perceived electoral advantage anyway.

A sea of flowers in the ocean of grief for Diana's death

Even so, I'd joined many of my countrymen on the roller-coaster ride from disdain to despair, by which we had illustrated, as if illustration were needed, that the opposite of love isn’t hatred but indifference. Clearly, though I had thought myself indifferent to the royal family (a bunch of polo-playing jet setters: how could they possibly speak for me?), I had been less indifferent than I hoped. 

I was apparently caught up in that bizarre love-hate affair between the British people and the royal family that shows no sign of dying down to this day. The Queen’s Jubilee, her cameo performance at the Olympic opening ceremony, stoked the love; but it takes only the slightest provocation to bring out all the worst in prurient spite again, as we’ve seen in the publication of the nude pictures of Prince Harry and now the topless photos of Kate, Duchess of Cambridge.

Ironic that we should have a row over Kate’s breasts just days after the relaunch of the campaign to stop the Sun newspaper’s topless page 3 girls.

I seem to have made a little progress since 1997. Had they not been reproduced in a mass-circulation tabloid on sale on every street corner, I would have seen none of the photos of Harry; at least, I didn’t go looking for any.

Similarly, it was a relief to discover that I not only avoided googling Kate’s breasts, I didn’t even have to resist a temptation to do so. I found it more interesting to read about the murder of the US ambassador in Libya which struck me as potentially more significant in our lives. After all, the Kate business had generated vitriol, but Libya produces oil.

Perhaps I’m learning a little of the indifference I was lacking before. It would be a comfort to know that the nation was doing the same, and for two reasons.

First, because this swinging backwards and forwards between adulation and contempt can’t be doing any of us any good.

Second, if we’re ever going to solve some of the problems that beset society, we need to unlearn our cult of deference towards those who claim the prerogative to be considered our betters. Then we’ll be able to learn how to insist on the right to make our own destiny.

It will be a measure of our success that we stop ogling the royals and buying the papers that feed us all the titbits (and the pun’s deliberate). That will mean mastering our thirst for publicity about them. 

Taking their statements at face value, that ought to please the royals. However, I wonder how happy they would really be at the prospect of drifting out of the public eye.

But by then, in our blessed indifference, why would any of us care what they thought?

Kate and Di may be beyond our aspirations, and some of us know it

Train travel continues to enthral me with the vignettes of English life it provides.

Yesterday I shared a table with a young man and woman who kept up a lively conversation all the way into London. Not a couple, just colleagues and friends travelling on the same train.

She wasn’t looking forward to the day, because she was going to be working with a group women she simply couldn’t bear.

‘We’re all such a different class,’ she announced, ‘they’re really nice but there’s this one that goes out on a different date each night. So she just sits there talking about her dates, with her fake tan and her impossibly high heels, and in a voice you can hear across the whole office. She’s nice but she’s really not my cup of tea.’

The picture forming in my mind was one of the classic ‘Essex girl’. In case you don’t know that image, let me just say that the answer to the question ‘how does an Essex girl turn on the light after sex?’ is ‘she pushes open the car door.’ This is, I’m sure, an unworthy calumny on the fine old county of Essex and the tens of thousands of irreproachable women from there, a slur promoted no doubt by the surrounding counties who’d like to pretend that they are strangers to anything remotely like sluttishness.

Meanwhile, there was more to come about the tiresome colleague.

‘I don’t think she gets it. I mean it’s her first job, working with us as an intern... I mean she’s just out of university...’

My ears pricked up. A degree? Essex girl has many fine assets but educational attainment isn’t generally one of them.

‘I mean, good on her, I think she’ll make it because she’s the right social class.’

Really? This didn't sound like the snobbery I was expecting.

‘I’ve never talked to her but I know a lot about her,’ she went on.

‘You’ve had to listen enough,’ commiserated her companion.

‘Exactly. She had fourteen people to dinner the other day and she takes a taxi to work. I’ll bet she doesn’t live in some little flat share with people she doesn’t know, I bet it’s her own, which her parents bought her.’

And there we have it. Not a cheap but cheeky Essex girl at all. More like a Sloane Ranger.

You don’t know what a Sloaney is? The name is derived from their tendency to congregate around London’s glorious Sloane Square and the elegant districts of Kensington and Chelsea nearby.

What’s the first thing a Sloaney makes when she’s laying on dinner for her friends? A call to a caterer.

Sloaneys also have their own special way with English vowels, so a ‘Kensington crèche’ is not a fashionable place to leave the children, it’s what leads to a dent on the Range Rover when the nanny’s taking them to school.

Now the young lady being complained of probably isn’t quite a Sloaney, the social category made famous by Princess Di in the eighties and revived recently by our new Princess Kate. No true Sloaney would have a fake tan – it would all be genuine, from St Moritz in the winter and somewhere exclusive in the Caribbean in the summer. But obviously the woman being complained of was somewhat closer to those exalted circles than the one complaining.

Sloaneys present and past: Kate and Di

So I’d got it exactly wrong. The problem was class, certainly, but the speaker regarded herself not as superior to the other woman but as her social inferior.

Instructive, I thought. It seems to me that the dividing linees between classes are sharpening  in England at the moment, and the recent street disturbances shows how they can explosively transform into battle lines. And that conversation in the train showed how heavily they weigh on our general consciousness.

Between the two friends there had been that cordiality and ease that the French sum up so eloquently as ‘complicity’. Their gender difference wasn’t a problem. Nor was racial difference: he was white and she, while her command of the language showed her to be entirely English, belonged to the group that we lazily refer to as ‘Indian’. Which suggests that a religious distinction also separated them, but seemed to affect them no more than the others.

So is that the nature of the moment we’re going through? Gender, racial and cultural differences are fading in importance in comparison to that age-old bitterness we call class division?

Sounds like a simplification. Though not one that will make our lives any easier.

Forgettable and unforgettable

My friend Ian has pointed out to me a shocking omission in my last post on memorable events: I failed to mention the recently announced engagement of ‘Wills to Kate’. I have, therefore, taken a look into the matter and it turns out that ‘Wills’ is a junior officer in the British Armed Forces whose only claim to fame is that he is in line to succeed to the British throne some day, a prospect he made possible by successfully pulling off the draining achievement of being born. Kate, it appears, is some even more obscure lady who has had an on-off relationship with Wills and they’ve now decided to get married. It’s hard to imagine anything more banal.

In any case, I refuse to get even interested in all this, because I seem to remember going through something similar with respect to his mother, and look where that led. In fact, thinking of her does remind me of an event for which I really can say that I know where I was when I learned about it. My wife and I were in Alsace, in Eastern France, and our friends Mary and Patrick had come down to visit us. They were staying in a hotel not far away and turned up as we were having breakfast.

‘Did you know that Princess Di had been killed?’ asked Patrick.

It came as a surprising shock. Surprising because I didn’t expect to be moved by any news about her. It was only a few days earlier that I had been inspired to great heights of cynicism by the sight of photos of Di sunbathing on the roof of a holiday house she had taken in the South of France. When I say ‘roof’, please don’t think of something flat and comfortable – she was lying on the ridge of a normal, gabled roof, with slates and gutters and everything. The only possible purpose for choosing somewhere so unpromising had to be that it was the only place that gave a really good view to all the photographers on boats in the bay, whose pictures she complained about endlessly when they came out the next day.

How could I possible feel any grief over somebody so completely self-obsessed? And yet when I heard the news I felt it as a terrible blow and somehow shared in the sense of mourning of so many of my countrymen (though, I’m glad to say, not enough to go and put flowers anywhere or stand among the massed crowds to watch her coffin go by). Strange. I’ve never understood why I found the event moving.

There is another event for which I can truly say that I knew where I was when I heard about it, which was the attack on the Twin Towers. I was being driven by a colleague and friend – funnily enough, the same Patrick who announced Princess Diana’s death to me – round the M25, London’s orbital motorway or, as so often happens, London’s orbital car park. A call came in from another colleague, Erika – actually, our only other colleague (it was a very small company).

‘Did you hear about the plane flying into the Twin Towers?’

Now, doesn’t that sound like the start of a joke?

‘No,’ I said with a chuckle, ‘what happened next?’

‘No, no,’ said Erika, ‘I mean it. A plane really has flown into the Towers.’

Over the next half hour or so we followed the unfolding tragedy on the car radio – the confirmation that we weren’t talking about some small plane but an airliner, full of passengers as well as the fuel that made it into a bomb; then the second plane; then the collapse of one tower, followed by the collapse of the other.

As the sheer extent of the horror sank in I was assailed by a sense of guilt. I’d received news of this tragedy as though it were a joke. It wasn’t strictly my fault but I still felt terrible about it. How inappropriately can one respond to something? It left me really quite uneasy.

So two events to which my reaction surprised me. At least the effect is that I really do remember what I was doing when I heard about them. Curious that it’s less because of the shock of the event itself as the effect of the strangeness of my reactions to them.