Prince Charles is just like us after all
Whe may have his valet run his bath, refuse to travel without his own pillow, crestembossed bone china and despite his vehement denial a leather-clad loo seat but it turns out that deep down Prince Charles, soon to be a septuagenarian, is exactly like us, his loyal subjects.
Put quite simply he just cannot believe it. Speaking on his tour of the Antipodes he admits he’s rocked to the core by the very idea that he could possibly be quite so antique. Prince Charles has revealed:
He’s bewildered by the notion that he’s about to be 70. As his big birthday looms he’s numb with a mixture of shock and awe. Inside, just like you and me, he feels like an acnepitted, hormone-fuelled 14-year-old.
As he vividly puts it: “Bits of me keep falling off at regular intervals.” The man is beset, just like us, with dicky knees, an unreliable digestive system and body parts which flatly refuse to function as they did when he was in his prime and he’s not taking it quietly. Like us he’s outraged at his array of ailments, aghast that such frailties should be inflicted upon him and railing against his personal brush with entropy.
He’s not as svelte as once he was and he’s not happy about it. Doing his best to jest he bewails the fact that he’ll no longer be able to struggle into a pair of budgie smugglers and he adds somewhat plaintively: “They keep telling me, don’t worry you have brilliant genes. But the trouble is, I can’t get into them.”
It’s a win win scenario. Yes, it suits HRH to reveal his intimations of mortality, unveil his vulnerability and show that even those of the blood royal find it desperately difficult to come to terms with the ageing process just as his adversaries are suggesting he leads a ridiculously etiolated life of privilege.
Fortunately it suits us equally well to discover we’re in such elevated company when bemoaning our wrinkles, aches and pains and spare tyres. If the superlatively-heeled are floored, fuming and furious at the side-effects of time marching on then why shouldn’t we lesser souls give vent to moans, complaints and whimpers as old age does its damndest?
Now we’re, to put it euphemistically, mature we realise the only people who have an inkling about getting older are the ancient. You have to be vintage to get it. When we’re in the bloom of youth we might imagine we can anticipate what it’s like to creak, pucker in places we didn’t know we had places and be treated like halfwits by vacant youths.
We can’t. It takes an oldie to appreciate an oldie and knowing not even Prince Charles has the wherewithal to escape a sojourn in the same boat somehow makes the invidious process a tiny bit easier.