On being royal!

It must be hard work being a member of a royal family, living your life in the public eye and all that. 

It appears that Prince Andrew - a prince not un-used to a bit of controversy - was a little impatient when the sensors on the gate of Windsor Great Park did not respond properly as he took a short cut home. So he rammed the gates open with his big expensive car. The police have no record of the incident in their log and so were unable to comment. Convenient! 

And his nephew, William, usually everyone's darling, with his charming little family, is coming in for some stick on the one hand for not doing as many royal engagements as his grandfather, a man surely old enough to retire by now, and on the other for hunting. That last one is a bit of a conundrum. He recently went hunting deer and wild boar in Spain on the day before giving a speech about illegal hunting of wildlife. And then just the other day he said it was ok to go trophy hunting (not shields and medals but big game, lions and such) so long as the animals hunted were old and infertile. And some people say it's all a little hypocritical. 

Oh, but it must be hard when you grow up in an atmosphere where hunting is acceptable, even if you wouldn't hunt illegally yourself and you don't personally want to go shooting lions and tigers and such like creatures. You could almost feel sorry for him. 

 As regards his going hunting in Spain, he is sort of related to the Spanish royal family. Queen Sofia (if she were in England, by now she would be the queen mother) and William's hard-working grandfather, our own Prince Philip, both come from the Greek royal family. And if one of your relatives invites you to go shooting wild boar, well, it would be churlish to turn them down. And we don't want our junior royal people looking churlish now, do we? 

Gosh, I bet they wish they could just get on with their skiing holidays and such without all this fuss. But at least they are not being taken to court, unlike some royal family members in a certain country. Not yet, anyway. Although, you never now, perhaps the gate- crasher might end up there yet! 

In our more humble lives, a different mind of royalty - the wealthy - are trying to curry our personal favour. I recently wrote about our travel problems: flooding, water on the lines, trains cancelled and delayed. Well, Virgin have refunded our travel costs in recognition of the inconvenience suffered. Not that we paid a vast amount to travel in the first place. 

Phil did mumble and mutter about how we might have deserved further compensation but really you can only expect magnanimity to go so far! There are limits after all!