Friends on Facebook and readers of ‘The Times’ will already have read the excellent article by Trevor Phillips; a robust piece of advice to Harry and Meghan on the subject of Real Life, something in which neither of them seems to have achieved an A grade, query even a pass.

Growing up in Disneyville, a little girl might be forgiven for thinking that if you get to marry the prince, the frocks and the jewels and the castle would be yours, ignoring the warnings of the crone spinning away in the attic at their peril.  The frocks were certainly on offer, although oddly declined in favour of jeans on a visit to Wimbledon, the very home of the Liberty Lawn tea dress.  The Queen herself had to put her foot down on the idea that you could wander into the royal jewel box and take what you wanted and also declined to have the happy couple setting up home in the spare room in Windsor Castle.  Good decision as it turned out.

Real Princess Anne has been getting it right for decades, turning up hundreds of times a year to cut ribbons at glitter-free factories, schools and hospitals, eating thousands of dinners being bored to death by Lord Lieutenants, shaking millions of hands.  Not a job that I would ever, ever want but because I wasn’t living in a cloud cuckoo land once I reached twelve, I didn’t sign up for it.  I’d much rather live in Canada too.  Nice people, beautiful country, great food.

And the reason real women are so cross at the moment is because we put up with – and fought to change – things a great deal worse than having nutters insult you on the Internet.  Nobody ever asked how we were either.

We didn’t have access to free contraception unless we were married.  We didn’t get maternity leave or have our jobs held open while we took it.  We couldn’t take out hire purchase without our husbands’ permission.  The police would not attend violent assaults on us which were dismissed as ‘domestics’.  If we divorced, we were lucky – and unusual – if it didn’t condemn us to a life of penury. Almost none of us went to university and only a third of women could drive.

What we did do in the last fifty years was get out there and change things.  A bit.  Although just yesterday, in 2020, the BBC was found guilty of paying women less than men.  It has never been easy being a woman and it’s a bloody sight harder than being a princess.

And looking back through my blogs I can see that from day one every single woman I spoke to said that the Harry and Meghan story would end in tears, not because she’s American or an actress or mixed race but because the pair of them seemed to be dim and delusional.  Turns out all of us were right.

 

Mine are about to become apparent.  Starting with ‘Speak up when you hear utter nonsense’.  Having lived for ages and survived all sorts of world threatening events, I now feel beholden to share a little of my accumulated wisdom.  In some countries, and you may not know this, older folk are seen as a valuable resource for their knowledge and not despised as Babyboomers who had it all. And FYI we are only one of the users of social care – over 40% of the cost is spent on younger people, so even that’s not our fault.

Let’s start with taxation.  I recently had a row with someone who thought all the ills of the world would be solved if we taxed billionaires more heavily. (No hint of student-level political thinking there then). How many are there in Britain?’ I enquired.  Answer was a totally random guess at 3000.  Real answer is 150 and remember that this is people with assets of a billion pounds, not annual income.  If they each paid tax of 1 billion a year (which wouldn’t happen as their actual income would never be that much) would we then live in a land of milk and honey?  No, sweetie, we wouldn’t.  It would JUST, JUST pay the annual running cost of the NHS.  This year.  Next year it will be more.

If everyone stops using fossil fuels will it result in world peace and clean air?  Sadly not because all the countries that make their living from flogging oil and coal – America, China, Russia, most of the Middle East and Australia, would take a fairly dim view of trying to make ends meet growing kale and avocados and probably start a war.  Geopolitics, people.  Pick up a history book.  The Kremlin has actually issued an edict, number 208 in case you missed it, stating that one of the major threats to the Russian economy is, drum roll, green energy. So they won’t be voting for it,

Electric cars, by the way, are run on electricity and that isn’t made by pollution-free unicorns. Electric vehicles are considerably heavier and more damaging to the roads and you might want to check out just what heavy metals are used to make their batteries.  Which have to be disposed of fairly frequently.

If you stop eating meat and fish and dairy products will you live forever?  And yet again the answer is no.  Because you won’t have put 2 seconds of thought into the implications.  There is a reason we have incisor teeth and long intestines; we need them to digest the foodstuffs we need to stay healthy.  You will end up suffering from horrible diseases caused by deficiencies of vitamins such as B12.   Have you even heard of vitamin K?  That’s the one that stops you bleeding to death during childbirth and is not largely found in plants.  Of course you can take supplements but it requires you to be aware that you need to.

Over the years I haven’t come to grief because of a nuclear attack by the then USSR, I haven’t died from not drinking 2 or 5 or 20 litres of water a day, I didn’t succumb to bird flu or the millennium bug in computers and I certainly have never taken 10,000 steps in 24 hours.  Made up nonsense for the most part.  The world, which mass panic says is going to come to an end through global warming has, in fact, survived no less than five ice ages and we are still in the tail end of the last one.  Did we ever have protesters trying to stop the world cooling down?

Far from being an Age of Enlightenment this is a time of extraordinary ignorance.  Nothing, nothing is as straightforward as you think.  Do some reading, do some research, ask some questions.  It suits some people to keep the world in a state of fear.  Trust me if you trust anyone.  There is no monster under your bed.

Now clean your teeth and go to sleep.