ÇA PLANE POUR MOI

I SHOULD PERHAPS BEGIN BY STATING that I have no particular wish to “diss”, as our young skateboarding and rapping community says nowadays, the great nation of Canada or its apologetic and pleasant people, although it would be easy to do so, as they insist on setting themselves up as targets to be popped at like slow-moving ducks on a fairground stall.

THE GREAT WHITE NATION has been favoured over recent centuries as a happy place to usher off the princes of Wales, who have often been troublesome young whippersnappers eager to grab at the throne, as was the case with Edward VII, gnawing at the heels of, or pulling at or hiding under the skirts of his mother the grand Victoria. Canada, then, has been a place to “send the lads off to drink and play”.

AND INDEED IT WAS WITH THIS INTENT that the present princely visit to Canada was arranged and planned; no one among the several entourages knew that William would in the meantime have become a husband. Thus the Royal Protocol has been faced with a problem: should one go ahead with the trip, which was planned to show “our Wills” skiing, sledging, speaking “French”, helicoptering and rescuing Eskimos from the jaws of walruses, eating seal dung and generally “getting it on” with the chaps who otherwise have to have their balls frozen for eleven months of the year? The decison was that cancellation would be wrong.

SCUPPERING THE EVENT HOWEVER, is the girlie and no doubt sweet-smelling presence of touchy-feely, walking-Laura-Ashley-advert the Duchess of Cambridge, née Kate “the” Middleton. Now, judging by the reaction of the screeching banshees and harridan cries of Canadian females, all they want is Kate; our proper future leader, the stolid, wooden, dull, thick-headed William, has been obfuscated by this glamour puss.

AND AT ESSENCE THIS IS THE PROBLEM of the Habsburgs. When was there last a decent mannish man at the helm? When one looks back over recent times we have to go back to Charles II, or possibly his son James II, in the late XVII century, to find a man who could tell his wife what to do and to shut up. Since then we have not had a decent man about the house – either they have been told what to do by their wives whilst kings or just shuffled off into a corner and ignored, like the future Charles III while husband to the murdered Diana Princess of Wales.

AT LEAST PRINCE WILLIAM IS BEING ignored in Canada, where, apparently, television is still in black and white and has a four-second time delay for “live” pictures to come to the BBC, and it is more or less always dark, at least mentally and intellectually. Whatever takes place over this tour it will not be a mould for future performances by this duo. Otherwise one may easily understand how William, like his father before him, could get fed up of his cutie wife outdoing him.