It's a week since my last post and the royal baby still hasn't made his or her appearance. (No sign of Kim K's baby either, but we'll talk about that in a separate blog post.) For now I'm thinking about royalty and all the hoopla surrounding Will and Kate's first child.
Just to make sure no-one misses the first picture of the baby, photographers started camping out at the door of the royal hospital as far back as July 2. At first I thought that was just stupid - in my cynical way I was thinking "Is the first picture really that important?" We all know what Will and Kate look like, and all we'll see of the baby is a blanket wrap and perhaps a tiny bit of a smushed up newborn face. Then I saw a link to video of Charles and Diana leaving the same hospital with William 31 years ago and after watching it I decided that yes, it is charming, and revealing, to actually see the big "leaving the hospital" moment.
In the video, Diana, who was a couple weeks shy of turning 21, looks young, vulnerable and slightly uncomfortable, not least because it's only 24 hours or so after the delivery. She's wearing one of her Catherine Walker maternity dresses and since she's not pregnant anymore it looks big and baggy, really unflattering. By contrast Charles looks stuffy and buttoned-up. The couple doesn't appear to be all that affectionate with each other, although that perception is surely influenced by knowing how things turned out. Charles gently hands the baby to Diana, they wave a little then get into the backseat of their car and drive off.
Presumably everything will be different this time. Kate is 10 years older than Diana was when William was born and she has a husband who clearly adores her. She also has the support of her sane, and still married, parents, to the extent that it's rumored she may spend her first few weeks postpartum at their home in Bucklebury instead of the palace. For all the "doors to manual" put-downs of the not-aristocratic Middletons, it seems to me that Kate's family is one of the best things she's got going for her. Even though Diana came from one of the most aristocratic close-to-royalty families in the country, which supposedly made her the perfect bride for Charles, looking back it sure doesn't seem as if they did much to help her when things started to fall apart. It's been 21 years since Charles and Diana separated and 16 years since she died, and it's hard to remember how ugly things got when the two of them decided they really hated each other. I feel comfortable saying things will work out much better this time around.
So when will the baby arrive? No way to know, but Twitter lit up with rumors of royal labor today, although so far it appears to be just speculation. No need to worry; all those photographers camped out at the Lindo Wing will start tweeting like mad as soon as the Duchess shows up. We'll know soon.
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