If you must abandon the missus, Wills, do it for a proper holiday
I’M NOT judging them, our two noble lions who have left pride and wives and young to go on the prowl on their own in their prime. Not for a second. Listen, if I were Prince William or David Cameron, and had seen the weather forecast for the long Easter weekend – heavy rain Maundy Thursday, scattered showers and sunny spells Good Friday, rain Saturday, heavy rain Easter Sunday, severe weather warning Bank Holiday Monday – I’d have said ‘Sod this’ and done a solo bunk too.
Not to mention the predicted travel chaos. When it comes to getting from West London to Exmoor for Easter, my personal best (worst) is 11 hours in traffic.
This year, I booked my sons seats on the 19.03 Paddington to Tiverton service on Maundy Thursday, and they weren’t even allowed to board as Great Western Railway staff said the train was so overcrowded.
So yes, I can just imagine William wheedling to a boot-faced Kate, ‘Look, hun, Jecca’s one of my oldest friends… Now don’t give me that look! It’ll be total non-speaks if I blow her out,’ then digging out some of his African beaded bangles, and jetting off to his first love’s Happy Valley nuptials in Kenya, while ‘the missus’ (as he calls her) stays behind painting boiled eggs with the nippers in the Aga kitchen in Norfolk because it’s too wet to go outside.
As for David Cameron, we know what he said to his pride before hopping on an easyJet flight to Lanzarote before his own family arrived a couple of days later: he told MPs that the super-fast news cycle was fatiguing and he needed ‘more time to think’.
I have no idea how Jecca’s wedding went. It was in Kenya. Invited guests are more discreet than random tourists.But when it comes to the PM, his mission to decompress and ‘gather’ gener- ally has not quite gone to plan as – like you – I feel as if I could be in Playa Blanca with him.
A fellow guest tweeted a picture of Dave bearing a plate mounded from the smorgasbord, wearing an all-inclusive wristband, with the plaintive question: ‘Why is David Cameron in my hotel?’
A Scottish rugby star is posting such regular updates on the PM’s movements – bantz about the weather, yoga sessions, paella lunches, all the selfies guests are demanding – that soon no doubt we will know within seconds when the PM withdraws with iPad for his morning ablutions.
All this makes me feel a bit sorry for him, but honestly – if you’re going to disappear on your tod, you don’t go to a fivestar resort in Lanzarote and do sun salutations by the pool.
I am the wife of a man who discovered he was a passionate fly-fisherman and golfer when our three children were at a demanding age (ie birth to 12), and the daughter of an environmentalist – and let me assure you: compared to accomplished male ‘escape artists’, Cameron and the Prince are rank amateurs.
My father would sometimes disappear up the Amazon to live with lost tribes for months at a time when we were small children. When my half-sister was two, he joined a British Antarctic Survey trip and was completely out of radio contact with my stepmother for six weeks apart from one communication – a postcard sent from Port Stanley, saying: ‘Love Stanley in Stanley.’
I don’t begrudge either Prince William or the Prime Minister their determination to carve out downtime, or me-time. Both have high-pressure jobs – OK, one does. We all need time to stand and stare and so on. So don’t let’s make an unholy row of their Holy Week exeats.
But both are such lightweights when it comes to their own little getaways to the sun that they might as well have stayed at home in the UK, racking up credits with their wives, eating chocolate eggs in the rain like the rest of us.
PS
SWEETEST snippet of last week: To Prince George, Her Majesty the Queen is ‘Gan-Gan’. My children called their great-grandmother ‘GaGa’, which maybe wouldn’t work so well in the Royal Household.