‘As long as there is a Royal Family, the Prince and Princess of Wales are stuck in its goldfish bowl’
No wonder the Prince and Princess of Wales timed the release of her diagnosis to be sure their children would have left school for the holidays.. But we can all relate to having to manage the news of a family illness, as it seeps out into our broader community’s pools of faux-concern, exaggeration and gossip. We all have experienced brushes with cancer in the family. We all relate to the urge to protect the children we love.
Yet in time, we may instead look back on this as the moment when the future king and queen reconnected with the country. If there is a function to the Royal Family in the 21st century, as I have written many times before, it is to act as a projection of our own families. We no longer fear or revere monarchs. We burden them instead with the parasocial trappings of intimacy. We grow up knowing them, although they do not grow up knowing us.