Too poised by half, Catherine
You’ve got to hand it to the Duchess of Cambridge for not putting a foot wrong since she wed and bred with Prince William. And what an elegant foot, pulling off the wearing of high heels just hours after giving birth to her third child. When she appeared on the hospital steps cradling her second son, she committed the sin of looking groomed and unruffled, as if she’d just emerged from having her toenails painted, rather than pushing an infant out into the world.
Such postnatal poise is downright sickening to some women who have posted puffy-faced pics of their exhausted physogs after giving birth.
Catherine probably didn’t even break sweat during her labour. A few short hours after giving birth, she managed to navigate a short flight of hospital entrance steps, as if she had a book balanced on her head. Any decent Earth Mother would have staggered heroically, clutching a handrail to support wobbly legs shaking like a newborn calf after their ordeal.
Has the duchess made it look all too easy? Should she have toned down her lightning liberation from the labour suite and loitered in her confinement a little longer?
Possibly the duchess has inadvertently become the poster woman for the unseemly and unsafe swift postnatal exit from maternity wards, a shining example to cash-strapped hospitals wanting to save funds and free up more beds.
Perhaps she has set impossible standards for the ordinary woman, some of whom may have had a rough time of it and for weeks been left limping and wounded in the nether regions from the Mark of Zorro.
But surely Catherine’s easy birth is akin to a peasant woman breaking briefly from her toil in the fields to drop one and have someone obligingly fetch it in the Monty Python manner.
No, it takes another type of village of specialised medics for a princess to give birth, an army of backroom girls and boys to create the breezy perfection the royal couple portrayed as they emerged – plus one.
You can’t appear to be too perfect. Look at Melania Trump, whose Madame Tussauds waxwork strangely looks more real than Madame Trump herself.
President Trump poured lavish praise on the state dinner his wife organised for the Macrons when he tweeted that Flotus did a spectacular job hosting the Macrons, and everything was perfection.
Before I knew what Flotus stood for (shorthand for First Lady of the United States), I thought it sounded like some sort of a scalp complaint.
Flotus did seem markedly more animated during the Macron visit, as if she had been temporarily released from the White House penitentiary to talk French with some sophisticated Europeans.
Meanwhile, her husband tried to show he had some skin in the game – Macron’s dead skin – as he loudly located a rogue speck of dandruff on the French president’s suit, and performed a showy head & shoulders brush.
This grotesque grooming gaffe was rich coming from Trump, whose suits look like barn dance clothes he has slept in. However, Macron smiled and laughed in the spirit of Trump’s homoerotic overtures to him, and indulged in a series of PDAs that made their wives look like beards.
Laugh Macron might, as he copped the dragonblooded president a beauty. Making a candid, coherent and critical speech about Trump’s isolationist policies and delivering it to the US Congress on Potus’ home soil, Macron made bromince of their bromance. At the end of the threeday visit, few were left in doubt where the unsightly flake resided.