WHY CAN’T THEY RESIST TRYING TO CHANGE US?
SOME say ‘it’ll never last’, and I agree. Prince Harry’s diet, that is. His marriage to lovely Meghan will last a lifetime — provided she does not keep trying to change him.
Before a wedding, it is not unusual for the man to lose weight. All that nagging from the family and in-laws. The women peck-peck-peck at the blushing bridegroom-to-be about all sorts of arrangements. The stress can put him off his nosebag.
There are four strands to the psychology. First, Harry will want to look lean for his wedding snapshots, aware they will define him for years.
Second, HRH adores his fiancee and wants to make her happy. If that means glugging back foul vegetable- and-vitamin juice concoctions over the breakfast table — ‘down the drainpipe with it, Capt Wales, for Queen and country!’ — so be it, even if they make his eyes bulge like autumn onions and give him frightful wind.
Third — I speak from personal experience — our hero possibly did not much enjoy the subtle tutting when the tailor took his measurements for the morning-coat. ‘Tsk-tsk, been at the biscuit barrel, sir?’
For Harry, reared on nursery food and Army canteen grub, nutritional self-denial may not come easily. But it is trumped by the fourth psychological element: male project completion.
Set us blokes a goal and we think of little else. A wedding becomes our Target. If ex-cavalry officer Harry is approaching it with the singlemindedness of a soldier preparing for Helmand Province, that is only in character.
But, dear Meghan, please don’t take it badly if, soon after the wedding, your new husband falters in his devotion to LA-style ‘clean eating’. A British prince, head over hooves in love and peeled away from his Mahiki muckers for a few months, may temporarily forgo his old rations.
To win the actress of his dreams, he may briefly abjure a Full English washed down with HP Sauce and a half-pint of sugared ‘brew’, as he calls tea. (Confusingly, when his more disreputable friends say ‘more tea, vicar?’ they mean ‘do you want another pint of beer?’ Harry may have forsaken real ale during his engagement, but no betting person would have confidence in him remaining abstemious on the honeymoon.)
Anyway, why change him? The reason Harry is so popular is that he has an appetite for life — and that must be true for Meghan, too. You fell for him the way he was, Meghan? Don’t change a winning formula.
Harry has a delicious enthusiasm for life in all its gravy. We don’t want him slender and shrewd. A skinny Harry would be like a deflated lilo. He is a figure of beef-Wellington gusto, not raw celery and boiled coley.
The U.S. TV star in Meghan may still preach the virtues of avocado-with-everything veganism, but British life may yet change her. And once Harry knows that ring is secure on his true love’s finger, the pressure will abate.
When his old pals wave a toad-in-the-hole under his face, his nose will twitch like the bulldog in Tom And Jerry, and he will yowl and howl until he is allowed to have some proper trough.