The ‘magic’ of Meghan
A royal seal of approval
Prince Harry believed that Meghan was “magic” because she could communicate with seals.
The Duke of Sussex tells the story of how the couple stumbled upon a pair of seals while on holiday on the north coast of Scotland with his father. The night before, over dinner, the then Prince Charles had told them the story of selkies, Scottish sirens disguised as seals and recommended that they sing to any seals they met to see if they respond. While on the beach, the Sussexes spotted a pair and the Duke ran over to sing to them, he writes.
He failed to get a response but when Meghan joined in and they answered her. “Soon enough, an endless number of heads began to appear in every part of the water, responding to her song,” he writes, saying he thought at that moment the Duchess “really is magic”.
He then stripped off and swam towards the seals.
The Royal family were staying at the Castle of Mey, which was bought by the Queen Mother in the 1950s.
When the pair returned, however, an Australian chef castigated the Duke for singing to the seals, saying he had been luring them to their deaths in the jaws of local orcas.
The visit to Mey, in the summer of 2018, came when the Sussexes were trying hard to conceive a child. The Duchess had previously been losing weight, which he blamed on stress.
The couple consulted an Ayuverdic doctor, a Hindu form of medicine, who told her that if she gained three kilos she would conceive.
Not long after the trip to Scotland, they had reason to perform a pregnancy test and the Duke resorted to further supernatural measures. He writes that while they were waiting for the results of the two tests he placed them on his nightstand next to a small box containing a lock of his dead mother’s hair. “All right, I told myself, good. We’ll see what Mum can do with it,” he writes. When both tests displayed positive, he thanked both his mother and the selkies.
The offbeat revelations continued when the Duchess gave birth. He admits he got through the day by eating Nando’s chicken delivered by his bodyguard and taking “long and deep” puffs from the laughing gas in her room.
The memoir portrays the Duke as leading something of a typical bachelor’s life before Meghan. He admits to shopping at TK Maxx, the discount shop, and reveals his dispiriting time in the Royal equivalent of a dingy bachelor pad: the studio flat in Kensington Palace. He complains that no matter the time of day, barely any light filtered into the flat. Such was the paucity of sunlight he had a row with a member of the Royal household who parked his Land Rover in front of the windows. According to the Duke, the member of staff effectively told him to get lost.
When he wasn’t sulking in his flat or fighting in Afghanistan, the young Duke was often out partying.
In one chapter he reveals how it was his idea to play strip billiards in Las Vegas, an event that led to naked pictures of him being leaked to the press. That same night, he recalls, his friends had to intervene to stop him from getting a map of Botswana tattooed on to the sole of his foot.