Kate bears her bump like a racehorse – I was more like a pony

Neat: the Duchess of Cambridge at Aston Villa Football Club this week

Oooh, have you seen the Duchess of Cambridge’s aesthetically pleasing baby bump? I have no desire to be accused of “bumpshaming” – yes, there is such a thing – I’d just like to admire its neatness. And, of course, sweetness.

Kate, 35 and already a mother of two, gives elegant lie to the received wisdom that later pregnancies show sooner and look bigger.

She is about four months pregnant, with a due date in April. Towards the end of my third trimester, I had the figure, and indeed appetite, of a Thelwell pony, trotting about effortfully from one supermarket to the next, bingeing on egg mayonnaise straight from the tub.

Kate, by comparison, is a thoroughbred, all sleek lines and svelte limbs. This week, she may have been shod in trainers, but she wore them with her trademark elegance.

My feet got so fat that, by the end, I ended up in my husband’s Birkenstocks.

Horses for courses, I suppose. And proof – if proof were needed

– of Fscott Fitzgerald’s observation that the very rich are different from you and certainly from me.