What should the Queen do with a gift of silver fruit? Show the nation

The younger members of the Royal family have lately taken to pointing out that being royal isn’t all it is cracked up to be in the fairy stories. Indeed, when you consider it, the advantages of the role seem decidedly overshadowed by its less appealing aspects: the ethnic dancing, the Royal Variety Performance, the obligation to make oneself agreeable to a tawdry cavalcade of tyrants, crooks and assorted egregious shysters in the name of international trade and diplomacy.

Then there is all the stuff. The one thing you don’t need, if you are royal and thus surrounded from birth by the accumulated detritus of centuries, is more tchotchkes. But there is no getting away from them. They come with the job.

Like Squirrel Nutkin’s tribe bringing placatory offerings to Old Brown, people feel obliged to render tributes. If you are a politician, you can sidestep the gaudier contributions by invoking the ministerial code that prohibits keeping anything worth more than £140. But gifts to royalty belong ultimately to the nation and (unless perishable or worth less than £150) they become part of the Royal Collection, so there is no hope of decluttering.

It is pleasant to think of the Queen, roaming the palace storerooms with a copy of The Life-changing Magic of Tidying, idly wondering how much joy a silver Post-it holder actually sparks. Deprived of that simple pleasure, she has done the next best thing and put her loot on public display.

Royal Gifts, which opens this Saturday at Buckingham Palace, provides its visitors with an opportunity to marvel at the limitless ingenuity of humans when it comes to manufacturing pointless objects: a bowl of silver fruit, a bronze owl, a glass cupcake. It also offers a timely reminder of a privilege strictly reserved for commoners: the exquisite satisfaction of arranging for a fatal dusting accident to befall such heartfelt, but hideous, gestures of goodwill.

Soon after his election in 2013, Pope Francis had some sharp words for “melancholic Christians with faces like pickled peppers”. Perhaps he has observed a pickled pepper or two roaming the Vatican corridors, for on the door to his private apartment a notice has appeared, featuring a Stop sign and the legend, “Vietato lamentarsi” or “No whingeing”.

It was given to the Pontiff by Dr Salvo Noè, a selfhelp guru whose website features a photograph of the dottore offering a cheery thumbs-up.

We should all aspire to be little rays of sunshine, of course. But I hope the papal Pollyanna principle is not going to apply to sacred texts, some of the most beautiful of which are also relentlessly moany.

In church as a child I used to beguile the awful tedium of sermons by reading the extravagant litanies of complaint composed by the psalmists. “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint,” grumbles the author of Psalm 22.

“I am become like a pelican in the wilderness and like an owl that is in the desert,” laments the poet of Psalm 102.

Both, clearly, have fallen into what the Pope’s sign identifies as “a syndrome of victimhood that reduces their sense of humour and capacity to solve problems”.

Still, when it comes to a choice between positive psychobabble and poetic gloom, I’ll take the gloom, every time.