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.