Mum Meghan knows best
Iwon’t say it’s always a bad thing to marry your mother. Many men do. But there’s that irritating thing about someone who always knows best, especially when they don’t, and being told to tidy your room when you want to sleep off a pounding hangover.
I get it in Prince Harry’s case, because he lost his mother when he was just a kid. Then he was packed off to a snobby boarding school where he’d have to conceal normal emotion, earn the English stiff upper lip, and concentrate on either managing bullies or becoming one.
It’s a ruthless environment, invented by the upper and richer classes to teach survival skills and unnatural practices to their young. In extreme cases it produces survivalists like Bear Grylls, a fellow Old Etonian, who proved its worth when he ate a weta. A cat will catch wetas, but cats have more sense.
When Harry met Meghan. he met an older woman who predictably knew what was best for him, which must have been a relief after all that prancing about in Nazi costumes, and falling down drunk. He saw the mother potential in her, and now they’re pregnant.
And now, as his mates might see it, he’s not only wedded but gelded.
I say this because, among the better class of lads of his generation, being a vegan, even just five days a week, must be an alarming, even laughable development. But this is what he’s doing, we’re told, to keep Meghan happy as she hatches his progeny.
This follows giving up cigarettes, that manly habit practised by my father, who predictably died of it. There wasn’t a manly movie for half a century that didn’t involve the hero, and certain types of sophisticated foreign women, sucking on a durry. It was punctuation during love-making. It went with Scotch on the rocks, and dragging women between the sheets while orchestral music swelled in a crescendo of passion.
There was no coughing, because this was the movies, and there were no full ashtrays lying about because they stink. Meghan did him a favour there.
Next, she turned him off alcohol. That was long overdue. Harry was the kind of ex-private schoolboy who was happiest making an ass of himself while drunk. There would have been down-trous. There would have been soppy declarations of eternal friendship with people he’d just met, and instant love with any woman not entirely ugly, the whole yawningly tedious and predictable course of a drunken lad’s evening in short. No loss.
More alarmingly, Meghan has urged him to give up tea and coffee, opening up a future of watercress smoothies and herbal teas that will make water, known to Temperance members as Adam’s Ale, look enticing. And the finishing touch for the reformed prince is to take up yoga, like his wife. Don’t anybody laugh.
Harry nonetheless went on the annual royal pheasant shoot on Boxing Day. I once saw French equivalents in elegant tweed jackets and high leather boots doing the same brave thing, shooting at half-tame birds bred and released by gamekeepers to save them the trouble of hunting down wild ones. They call it sport.
Meghan didn’t have to watch and squeal with delight over the little corpses, but I bet she has her say when Harry nuzzles up to her at night with blood metaphorically on his hands.
Under his mother/wife’s tutelage, he’ll end up like his father at this rate, chatting to the veges in his garden, manicured and cultivated for his pleasure by others, and wagging a stern finger at a modern world he doesn’t live in.
It’s what the aristocracy is for, after all. That and breeding.