Tying the knot, Windsor style
We commoners can be grateful we don’t get the MI5-level scrutiny and dirt-digging, writes Nadine Higgins.
Little girls are often told the day they get married will be the one day on which they get to feel like a princess. But no one deserves that, especially on their wedding day.
With just 40-odd sleeps to go, little about Meghan Markle’s experience looks like fun.
OK, so the marrying a prince, in a castle, wearing a dress that costs more than most houses – those bits sound OK. But the rest of it sounds like a nightmare.
As a ‘‘princess’’ bride, she’s at the centre of a feast, where we – the commoners – gorge ourselves on the minutiae of their wedding plans. We breathlessly lap up every detail – which is reported more voraciously by the day – like the eternal bridesmaid eagerly awaiting her turn.
Usually, getting stuck listening to a bride recite the progress she’s made on her wedding to-do list is an unenviable position, but the celebrity/royalty combo has the world clutching its pearls and gasping at every revelation. We’re nothing more than wedding pervs.
Their invitations were printed on a stamping machine from the 1930s – how quaint! But they used American ink – how apt! The flowers will pay tribute to Princess Diana – how touching! The cake will be organic lemon and elderflower – how very on-trend!
There’s a long list of the royal traditions that have been observed – she’s been baptised by the Archbishop of Canterbury, phew! And those which have been broken – no fruit cake, shock horror!
If having your every decision picked over before the big day has even arrived isn’t enough, having a ‘‘princess’’ wedding means you can also look forward to having every detail of your life published and picked over. A bit of ritual humiliation, served up with a side dish of long-lost ‘‘friend’’ snark, seems to be a royal rite of passage.
The tabloids have hit the jackpot with Markle because not only does she have a bitter, twisted halfsister with a tell-all book in the works, her ex-husband is attempting to cash in by writing a TV series about a guy whose wife leaves him for a prince. Art/life anyone? To top it off, Diana’s biographer will release a book on Markle a month before the wedding.
The excerpt released so far details such fascinating insights as: she had buck teeth as a kid but had braces to fix them. Her first boyfriend matches the description of Todd from Sweet Valley High – white, chiselled, 6ft 5 and a basketball player.
A friend alleges that as a kid Markle wanted to be ‘‘Diana 2.0’’. It details her stint as a suitcase chick on Deal or No Deal when she was a struggling actress, but how she also became ‘‘a networker to her fingertips’’, who forgot her friends on her rise to the top. It suggests she ended her marriage by sending the rings back in the post. Oh, and she rehearsed how to drink tea, in LA, before going to meet the Queen.
How many of us would stand up to such MI5-level scrutiny? I shudder to think what my tell-all might read like: the ugly duckling ‘‘braces’’ photos; the somewhat less Sweet Valley High description of my first boyfriend. There are the nights spent as a ‘‘Jim Beam girl’’ to earn some cash, the night I passed out in the loo of a bar and woke up at 4am; the estranged relatives and former rivals seizing an opportunity to level the score.
The trouble is, you’d have to be a saint or a bore to get to your 30s without a few stories. Luckily for Markle, she’s marrying the naughty prince. For every story touted by former friends that college-Meghan liked to party, Harry can trump her with some sweet nudie shots from that wild night in Vegas. For every embarrassing shot of her feigning surprise as she opened suitcases on Deal or No Deal, Harry can reassure her with pics of that time he thought a Nazi outfit was a good idea for fancy dress.
You see, for all the fuss, the expense and the gossip, they’re just two people getting married. As for the digging for dirt – you know what they’re digging for. But I’d argue you really have to love a guy whose baggage includes the British tabloids, because being a ‘‘princess’’ ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.