Thoughts about Bill and Kate Windsor

Let's get this straight to begin with: I am not an anti-royalist and I am not a republican.

I know some people who like the idea of a royal family and others who don't. But it seems to me that the vast majority of people have no feelings either way.  And on the basis of that, if it ain't broke, then there's no need to fix it.

I have nothing against Bill and Kate Windsor either.

They seem to be a nice enough couple, normal enough whilst living within the most unreal bubble possible.

And now they have had a baby.

There is nothing exceptional about Kate having a baby because there were another 370,000 of them born on the same day, as there are every day.  But the media has ensured that only one gets any kind of coverage other than in the announcements pages of the local rag.

Yes, you could argue, as I'm not arguing, that we now have another burden on the state.  A dysfunctional family with almost no one in work adding to the welfare bill.  But that's not how I feel.

Bill and Kate's life is something I will never understand.

Bill has a job flying helicopters and from time to time he joins Kate to rush around shaking hands with people and opening things, as well as 'supporting' charities.

And sometimes, as Bill's late mother showed, the attitudes of society can be changed by engagement in controversial areas, such as AIDS and land mines.  So Diana Spencer, who lest we forget, was absolutely loathed by the press (and the rest of the royals, so it seemed) in the summer before she died made a difference.

Maybe Bill and Kate will do the same.

As things are, they have had a baby and I am happy for them.

I'm still not clear what the point of the royal family is but there's something quaint and eccentric about it.

I don't like the stuff about 'your highness' in this modern era but it doesn't really mean much.

Like I said, I think the general British attitude is ambivalence.

They don't harm anyone, they're better than the alternative (whatever that is: we shall never know) and they cost an awful lot less than a Trident missile.

We live in a country of 63 million people of which some 500 turned up to the luxury private hospital when Bill and Kate's baby turned up and almost all of the 500 were media folk.

But the newspapers don't run souvenir issues (who keeps a souvenir issue for goodness sake?) and countless photographs for nothing.  People must buy them.

I don't envy Bill and Kate, or baby Windsor (my money is on Keith or Wayne, by the way), their future lives.

Perhaps they can make some sense of it all but they will never do anything remotely normal.

They will 'serve' and 'do their duty' and all being well live healthily into old age and we'll get on with our own lives, usually glimpsing them from time to time during the 'And finally' bit of the TV news.

We do this sort of thing very well in Britain.

In the National Lampoon European Vacation, Chevy Chase's character Clark Griswold is asked by his children what the queen does.

"She queens!" replies Griswold.

I think that's our understanding of what she does too and for most of us it's not going to change anytime soon.  And why should it?