The Royal Family #34

[qwikti]

She must've felt like a star, bless her

 

[Boring Monday]

Sandringham 2013
Christmas with the family. Hotel Granny was full that year, overrun by family, so I was given a mini room in a narrow back corridor, among the offices of Palace staff. I’d never stayed there before. I’d rarely even set foot there before.
I liked the notion of seeing and exploring uncharted territory—I was a grizzled polar explorer, after all!—but I also felt a bit unappreciated. A bit unloved. Relegated to the hinterlands.

Alas, my family at that moment was infected with some very scary malware. It was largely to do with the Court Circular, that annual record of “official engagements” done by each member of the Royal Family in the preceding calendar year. Sinister document.
Certain family members had become obsessed, feverishly striving to have the highest number of official engagements recorded in the Circular each year, no matter what, and they’d succeeded largely by including things that weren’t, strictly speaking, engagements, recording public interactions that were mere blips, the kinds of things Willy and I wouldn’t dream of including. Which was essentially why the Court Circular was a joke. It was all self-reported, all subjective. Nine private visits with veterans, helping with their mental health? Zero points. Flying via helicopter to cut a ribbon at a horse farm? Winner!
But the main reason the Court Circular was a joke, a scam, was that none of us was deciding in a vacuum how much work to do. Granny or Pa decided, by way of how much support (money) they allocated to our work. Money determined all. In the case of Willy and me, Pa was the sole decider. It was he alone who controlled our funds; we could only do what we could do with whatever resources and budget we got from him. To be publicly flogged for how much Pa permitted us to do—that felt grossly unfair. Rigged.

Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex.

You are doing sterling work @Anna2020

Now, y’see this is the kind of stuff I can believe.

 

[wkdlass]

Yes, thank you @Anna2020 and everyone who has shared extracts

 

[Onetwofour]

Sandringham 2013
Christmas with the family. Hotel Granny was full that year, overrun by family, so I was given a mini room in a narrow back corridor, among the offices of Palace staff. I’d never stayed there before. I’d rarely even set foot there before.
I liked the notion of seeing and exploring uncharted territory—I was a grizzled polar explorer, after all!—but I also felt a bit unappreciated. A bit unloved. Relegated to the hinterlands.

Alas, my family at that moment was infected with some very scary malware. It was largely to do with the Court Circular, that annual record of “official engagements” done by each member of the Royal Family in the preceding calendar year. Sinister document.
Certain family members had become obsessed, feverishly striving to have the highest number of official engagements recorded in the Circular each year, no matter what, and they’d succeeded largely by including things that weren’t, strictly speaking, engagements, recording public interactions that were mere blips, the kinds of things Willy and I wouldn’t dream of including. Which was essentially why the Court Circular was a joke. It was all self-reported, all subjective. Nine private visits with veterans, helping with their mental health? Zero points. Flying via helicopter to cut a ribbon at a horse farm? Winner!
But the main reason the Court Circular was a joke, a scam, was that none of us was deciding in a vacuum how much work to do. Granny or Pa decided, by way of how much support (money) they allocated to our work. Money determined all. In the case of Willy and me, Pa was the sole decider. It was he alone who controlled our funds; we could only do what we could do with whatever resources and budget we got from him. To be publicly flogged for how much Pa permitted us to do—that felt grossly unfair. Rigged.

Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex.

At least this point is interesting. It shows - what I was suspecting - that numbers might not be an enough good parameter to give an idea of the work behind.

 

[Anna2020]

The papers were awash with stories about Willy being lazy, and the press had taken to calling him “Work-shy Wills,” which was obscene, grossly unfair, because he was busy having children and raising a family. (Kate was pregnant again.) Also, he was still beholden to Pa, who controlled the purse strings. He did as much as Pa wanted him to do, and sometimes that wasn’t much, because Pa and Camilla didn’t want Willy and Kate getting loads of publicity. Pa and Camilla didn’t like Willy and Kate drawing attention away from them or their causes. They’d openly scolded Willy about it many times. Case in point: Pa’s press officer berated Willy’s team when Kate was scheduled to visit a tennis club on the same day Pa was doing an engagement. Told that it was too late to cancel the visit, Pa’s press officer warned: Just make sure the Duchess doesn’t hold a tennis racquet in any of the photos! Such a winning, fetching photo would undoubtedly wipe Pa and Camilla off the front pages. And that, in the end, couldn’t be tolerated. Willy told me that both he and Kate felt trapped, and unfairly persecuted, by the press and by Pa and Camilla, so I felt some need to carry the banner for all three of us in 2015. But selfishly, I also didn’t want the press coming for me. To be called lazy? I shuddered. I never wanted to see that word attached to my name. The press had called me stupid for most of my life, and naughty, and racist, but if they dared to call me lazy…I couldn’t guarantee I wouldn’t go down to Fleet Street and start pulling people out from behind their desks. I didn’t understand until months later that there were even more reasons why the press was gunning for Willy. First, he’d got them all worked up by ceasing to play their game, denying them unfettered access to his family. He’d refused several times to trot Kate out like a prized racehorse, and that was considered a bridge too far.

Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex

 

[Em_gardener]

I think the guardian review that said you could tell from the storytelling style that Harry was an avid consumer of the tabloids was spot on. He can spin line a tabloid and so many of his stories are a tabloid's delight - all the penis mentions for a start.
I've started reading it. I downloaded it for free - they have a link on the other thread. He gives away a lot of info that seems kind of worthless but probably does matter to the family of people involved - like describing the layout of Balmoral or sharing how Prince Charles did handstands in his boxers every day because of his back problems. There's nothing bad about it but it's not adding anything to the story of Harry's life so didn't really need to be included.

 

[hehehe]

'Significant' Queen Mother error in new Harry book sparks accuracy row

Prince Harry has sparked uncertainty over the accuracy of his book after describing a scene that appears could not physically have happened.

www.express.co.uk

i did rather like the last line get out clause, though …
As a defence mechanism, most likely, my memory was no longer recording things quite as it once did."

Or, indeed, at all

"uncertainty over the accuracy"

Can the spineless press call this jerk out for the barefaced bleeping LIAR he is.

 

[qwikti]

The papers were awash with stories about Willy being lazy, and the press had taken to calling him “Work-shy Wills,” which was obscene, grossly unfair, because he was busy having children and raising a family. (Kate was pregnant again.) Also, he was still beholden to Pa, who controlled the purse strings. He did as much as Pa wanted him to do, and sometimes that wasn’t much, because Pa and Camilla didn’t want Willy and Kate getting loads of publicity. Pa and Camilla didn’t like Willy and Kate drawing attention away from them or their causes. They’d openly scolded Willy about it many times. Case in point: Pa’s press officer berated Willy’s team when Kate was scheduled to visit a tennis club on the same day Pa was doing an engagement. Told that it was too late to cancel the visit, Pa’s press officer warned: Just make sure the Duchess doesn’t hold a tennis racquet in any of the photos! Such a winning, fetching photo would undoubtedly wipe Pa and Camilla off the front pages. And that, in the end, couldn’t be tolerated. Willy told me that both he and Kate felt trapped, and unfairly persecuted, by the press and by Pa and Camilla, so I felt some need to carry the banner for all three of us in 2015. But selfishly, I also didn’t want the press coming for me. To be called lazy? I shuddered. I never wanted to see that word attached to my name. The press had called me stupid for most of my life, and naughty, and racist, but if they dared to call me lazy…I couldn’t guarantee I wouldn’t go down to Fleet Street and start pulling people out from behind their desks. I didn’t understand until months later that there were even more reasons why the press was gunning for Willy. First, he’d got them all worked up by ceasing to play their game, denying them unfettered access to his family. He’d refused several times to trot Kate out like a prized racehorse, and that was considered a bridge too far.

Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex

How is this his truth anymore?... This is Will and Kate's story, and not to mention probably an ongoing dilemma for them, as they're still next in line waiting at the behest of Charles and Camilla. How uncomfortable.

I do genuinely wonder what's going through his mind as he writes these passages with no discretion revealing things that aren't his to reveal.
Is it just plain old jealousy and spite? Is it a desire to inflame the public? Does he think he's doing the institution a favour by showing it some ugly truths? I really really can't tell. He can chat about his frozen knob till the cows come home if he likes, but I just don't get these bits.


P.S thanks for sharing the bits and bobs, I've only just started reading, and I'm getting distracted by Tattle so I haven't gotten very far

 

[Anna2020]

OTHER THAN THE occasional shopping, I stopped going out in 2015.
Stopped entirely. No more occasional dinners with mates. No more house parties. No clubs. No nothing. Every night I’d go straight home from work, eat over the sink, then catch up on paperwork, Friends on low in the background.

After dinner I’d smoke a joint, trying to make sure the smoke didn’t waft into the garden of my neighbor, The Duke of Kent.
Solitary life. Strange life. I felt lonely, but lonely was better than panicky. I was just beginning to discover a few healthy remedies to my panic, but until I felt surer of them, until I felt on more solid ground, I was leaning on this one decidedly unhealthy remedy. Avoidance. I was an agoraphobe.

After one speech, which couldn’t be avoided or canceled, and during which I’d nearly fainted, Willy came up to me backstage. Laughing. Harold! Look at you! You’re drenched. I couldn’t fathom his reaction. Him of all people. He’d been present for my very first panic attack. With Kate. We were driving out to a polo match in Gloucestershire, in their Range Rover. I was in the back and Willy peered at me in the rearview. He saw me sweating, red-faced. You all right, Harold? No, I wasn’t. It was a trip of several hours and every few miles I wanted to ask him to pull over so I could jump out and try to catch my breath. He knew something was up, something bad. He’d told me that day or soon after that I needed help. And now he was teasing me? I couldn’t imagine how he could be so insensitive. But I was at fault too. Both of us should’ve known better, should’ve recognized my crumbling emotional and mental states for what they were, because we’d just started to discuss the launching of a public campaign to raise awareness around mental health.

Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex.

 

[Em_gardener]

"uncertainty over the accuracy"

Can the spineless press call this jerk out for the barefaced bleeping LIAR he is.

There's no excuse for that when he could have googled himself to find out!

He gives a kind of disclaimer early on in the book that he's recounting his own memories. Then says "there's just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts. Things like chronology and cause and effect are often just fables we tell ourselves."

 

[Jwren]

The Hebdo cartoon is fucked up, but this is what Harry has brought on himself.

Does anyone know what the French headline translates to?

How come the French press weren't branded racists for Hebdo's depiction of M in their 2021 DoE cartoon?

I think it translates into ‘What happed to the 25 Tabliban killed by Harry’, then the little quote down the bottom by sketches of the Taliban says …..’we f*ck his mother in paradise’.
I agree it‘s f*ucked up but what Harry said will be equally offensive and shocking to many. As you say he’s pretty much brought it on himself.

 

[Anna2020]

Africa and Invictus, these had long been the causes closest to my heart. But now I wanted to dive in deeper. Over the last year or so I’d spoken to helicopter pilots, veterinary surgeons, rangers, and they all told me that a war was on, a war to save the planet. War, you say? Sign me up. One small problem: Willy. Africa was his thing, he said. And he had the right to say this, or felt he did, because he was the Heir. It was ever in his power to veto my thing, and he had every intention of exercising, even flexing, that veto power. We’d had some real rows about it, I told Teej and Mike. One day, we almost came to blows in front of our childhood mates, the sons of Emilie and Hugh. One of the sons asked: Why can’t you both work on Africa? Willy had a fit, flew at this son for daring to make such a suggestion. Because rhinos, elephants, that’s mine! It was all so obvious. He cared less about finding his purpose or passion than about winning his lifelong competition with me. Over several more heated discussions, it emerged that Willy, when I’d gone to the North Pole, had sadly been resentful. He’d felt slighted that he hadn’t been the one invited. At the same time he also said that he’d stepped aside, gallantly, that he’d permitted me to go, indeed that he’d permitted all my work with wounded soldiers. I let you have veterans, why can’t you let me have African elephants and rhinos? I complained to Teej and Mike that I’d finally seen my path, that I’d finally hit upon the thing that could fill the hole in my heart left by soldiering, in fact a thing even more sustainable—and Willy was standing in my way. They were aghast. Keep fighting, they said. There’s room for both of you in Africa. There’s need for you both.

Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex.

 

[Meowsy]

Sandringham 2013
Christmas with the family. Hotel Granny was full that year, overrun by family, so I was given a mini room in a narrow back corridor, among the offices of Palace staff. I’d never stayed there before. I’d rarely even set foot there before.
I liked the notion of seeing and exploring uncharted territory—I was a grizzled polar explorer, after all!—but I also felt a bit unappreciated. A bit unloved. Relegated to the hinterlands.

Alas, my family at that moment was infected with some very scary malware. It was largely to do with the Court Circular, that annual record of “official engagements” done by each member of the Royal Family in the preceding calendar year. Sinister document.
Certain family members had become obsessed, feverishly striving to have the highest number of official engagements recorded in the Circular each year, no matter what, and they’d succeeded largely by including things that weren’t, strictly speaking, engagements, recording public interactions that were mere blips, the kinds of things Willy and I wouldn’t dream of including. Which was essentially why the Court Circular was a joke. It was all self-reported, all subjective. Nine private visits with veterans, helping with their mental health? Zero points. Flying via helicopter to cut a ribbon at a horse farm? Winner!
But the main reason the Court Circular was a joke, a scam, was that none of us was deciding in a vacuum how much work to do. Granny or Pa decided, by way of how much support (money) they allocated to our work. Money determined all. In the case of Willy and me, Pa was the sole decider. It was he alone who controlled our funds; we could only do what we could do with whatever resources and budget we got from him. To be publicly flogged for how much Pa permitted us to do—that felt grossly unfair. Rigged.

Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex.

I looked up, and apparently Prince Charles was the hardest working Royal in 2013. Is he calling his own father “certain family members”? And saying that he inflates the number of his engagements to come out on top?

 

[neroli]

Fastest selling "non" fiction book indeed..

 

[Em_gardener]

I think it translates into ‘What happed to the 25 Tabliban killed by Harry’, then the little quote down the bottom by sketches of the Taliban says …..’we f*ck his mother in paradise’.
I agree it‘s f*ucked up but what Harry said will be equally offensive and shocking to many. As you say he’s pretty much brought it on himself.

No that's really messed up. I saw it and I don't think there's any defending it. It's not even witty or clever and it doesn't seem to be making any kind of point about anything - not that I can make out anyway. I don't think he's brought that on himself - I put the blame for this on Charlie Hebdo. It's his dead mother that's the butt of the joke moreso than Harry and Diana has another son and plenty other relatives that will be horrified by this.
Charlie Hebdo seem like tit stirrers to me. The attack on their offices was horrible but they're just shocking for the sake of being shocking. What are they trying to say?

 

[Boring Monday]

The flip from 'mummy' to cock and back again is so rapid that my head is spinning. Freud may have had a point.

I do rather love the idea that with the whole of heaven to go at, Diana would mix with Newton and Chaucer.

 

[Spid]

The flat had three tall windows, but they admitted little light, so the differences between dawn, dusk and midday were nominal at best. Sometimes the question was rendered moot by Mr. R, who lived directly upstairs. He liked to park his massive gray Discovery hard against the windows, blotting out all light entirely. I wrote him a note, politely asking if he might perhaps pull his car forward a few inches. He fired back a reply telling me to suck eggs. Then he went to Granny and asked her to tell me the same. She never did speak to me about it, but the fact that Mr. R felt secure enough, supported enough, to denounce me to the monarch showed my true place in the pecking order. He was one of Granny’s equerries.

Every day Mrs. R parked her car in Mummy’s old spot.She was guilty of an even more egregious vehicular crime than her husband.
I can still see her gliding into that space, right where my mother’s green BMW used to be. It was wrong of me, and I knew it was wrong, but on some level I condemned Mrs. R for it.

Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex.

Who is Mr R?

She must've felt like a star, bless her

Don't know who is worse her or the media for sending photographers there

 

[FenellaTheWitch]

The flip from 'mummy' to cock and back again is so rapid that my head is spinning. Freud may have had a point.

At least Elizbeth Arden got a free plug that their cream works on a frostbitten penis

 

[Boring Monday]

I looked up, and apparently Prince Charles was the hardest working Royal in 2013. Is he calling his own father “certain family members”? And saying that he inflates the number of his engagements to come out on top?

That is the stuff I can absolutely see happening.

 

[Jwren]

No that's really messed up. I saw it and I don't think there's any defending it. It's not even witty or clever and it doesn't seem to be making any kind of point about anything - not that I can make out anyway. I don't think he's brought that on himself - I put the blame for this on Charlie Hebdo. It's his dead mother that's the butt of the joke moreso than Harry and Diana has another son and plenty other relatives that will be horrified by this.
Charlie Hebdo seem a like tit stirrers to me. The attack on their offices was horrible but they're just shocking for the sake of being shocking. What are they trying to say?

Likewise, I think a lot what Harry has put in his book is indefensible. What Harry said about executing people will be equally deeply offensive to many, especially those in Afghanistan who lost loved ones and of course the Taliban. Why did anyone need to know he saw life as chess pieces and that he executed 25 people?

Edit. Not that I know for sure but it’s possibly saying you’ve belittled the lives of others Harry by gloating about your kills and dehumanised them saying you saw them as chess pieces, we can do the same to your deceased loved one. Also the Taliban who Harry states he executed have no respect for women whatsoever and clearly in that sketch there’s no respect for his deceased mother.
Someone might have a different take on it that’s all I can come up with. I don’t agree with it at all it’s shocking but if you poke the bear don’t be surprised when it attacks back.