The real purpose of royal weddings

Now the bunting has come down and the prosecco bottles are consigned to the recycling, it has become abundantly clear what royal weddings are for - they are a national (and international...) form of catharsis, a global opportunity to be as rude as we wish we could be at actual weddings.

Let's be honest - only the truly saintly among us have never snarked at a wedding. Whether it's speculating from behind an order of service about how long the marriage might last, telling a bride she looks beautiful when you secretly think the dress looks like a feral shower curtain, or judging the choice of a Celine Dion track for the first dance, we've all been there. Sometimes snarkers aren't even subtle - I was told I was "brave" for not wearing a white dress, as if getting married in silver and black was heroism on par with rescuing orphans from a burning building.

But when it's a royal wedding, on telly for all of us to see, we let loose. The white lies and good manners that lubricate the wheels of polite society dry up. This is not new, despite social media.

When Charles and Di got married back in 1981, Princess Anne's omelette-like hat and the crush-fest of a wedding dress attracted much low-tech snarking. Indeed, this was immortalised in Sue Townsend's The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4, with Adrian reporting that the princess wore a "dirty white dress". In the TV adaptation, Bert Baxter, the curmudgeonly OAP, said: "I know a wrinkle when I see one!" as everyone watched Diana enter St Paul's Cathedral looking like she was dressed in the handiwork of the Andrex puppy.

And with Twitter and Facebook, snarking went into overdrive as soon as the guests started arriving at St George's Chapel on Saturday. In between people expressing delight at the simple elegance of Meghan Markle's wedding dress, plenty declared they were bored by the dress, as if she got dressed solely for their entertainment, as if she owed the world a riot of sequins, itchy lace and a big old arse bow.

During the wedding service itself, collective pearls were clutched during the lively sermon given by the Reverend Michael Curry, the African-American primate and presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. This was hilarious (such as the starched fart faces of certain people in the congregation) and a bit disturbing - an angry online mob of white people complaining that a black bishop is talking for too long is somewhat unseemly to witness. Of course, when I dared point this out on Twitter, a bunch of white people landed in my notifications to tell me I am racist and that they really didn't notice the bishop was black.

Apparently, 14 minutes of airtime was more than some people were prepared to deal with, even though it was the most entertaining and memorable part of the whole damn wedding.

The Venn diagram of people who have ever screeched "Britain is a Christian country!" and those who felt the need to complain about Reverend Curry going on a bit would probably overlap quite significantly. How many of these supposed defenders of the Church of England against threats, real or imaginary, regularly attend church?

Fourteen minutes is by no means an epic sermon, as anyone who goes to church can attest. The eminently forgettable sermon at William and Kate's wedding ran for about eight minutes but both wedding ceremonies lasted about an hour in total - the Book of Common Prayer marriage liturgy can be a wordy, time-consuming thing, especially when you add hymns to the mix. Give me a lively 14-minute sermon over a couple of dirgy seven-verse hymns pooped out of an arthritic pipe organ any day. 

And here's the inconvenient truth for those who thought the reverend's sermon was too long or too over-the-top or both - if you are genuinely concerned for the survival of Christianity in the UK, you might want to congratulate black British people for doing their bit to keep churches open. The British Social Attitudes survey documented from 1983 to 2014 a steady decline for the Church of England and a slight decline for the Roman Catholic church but a substantial increase in "other churches", many of which are dominated by people of African and Caribbean heritage. Between 2001 and 2011, white Christians declined by 18%  in London whereas black Christian growth was at 32% over the same period. The growth in church attendance is fuelled by black and ethnic minorities, not white Brits.

And if that means lively sermons are getting bums on pews, anyone who has panicked about the decline of church attendance in Britain should celebrate these extra bums regardless of the colour of the cheeks.

The Meghan Markle conundrum

Here's the thing about the royal family - even though their lives are far removed from ours, we still feel like we know them. Based on their limited, highly controlled interviews, absurd magazines and the occasional tell-all from a "palace insider", we reckon we have them all figured out.

Hell, I have Kate and William pegged as a nice but dull couple, the kind of people you'd trust to feed the cat while you're on holiday - but you wouldn't give them the task because then you'd have to invite them over for dinner and that would be excruciating. But Zara and Mike seem fun so I'd happily give them the house keys while I was on holiday. And - this is my controversial opinion - I think Camilla would be a right laugh too. She can pop over for a cheeky G&T.

We know them on first name terms even though we're supposedly meant to address them by ludicrous titles. And as of this weekend, Meghan and Harry will gain their very own ludicrous titles as they embark on married life and attempt to carve out their place in the world.

And speaking of places in the world, with the bizarre news that Prince Charles will walk Meghan at least halfway up the aisle today, in the absence of her ailing father - and despite her mother being in town - plenty of wags have suggested that finally after nearly 70 years on this planet, the hapless Charles has found something to do. The poor bugger has spent his entire life resembling a slightly beside-the-point Quentin Blake illustration.

Of course, the past week's who-will-walk-Meghan-up-the-aisle TMZ-fuelled brouhaha meant everyone felt the need to share their views on the whole notion of men giving brides away. Let's be honest - "giving a bride away" is hardly a feminist statement but when I got married at the ripe, old age of 34, Dad, a man who supports me in all I do, walking me down the aisle was lovely

That said, now we all know Prince Charles is doing the honours, opinion is divided, again as if we know the royals personally and have been privy to all the behind-closed-doors discussions. Did Meghan really ask Prince Charles to do this or was the Kensington Palace statement fake news? Is it a nice way to welcome her to the family? Is it sidelining Doria Ragland, the mother-of-the-bride? Surely the bigger story is sweeping homeless people off the street and not putting on a bunch of hog roasts for the people allowed into the castle grounds? Is it all just a bit weird for a father to give a woman to his son?

My first reaction was "Ick!" but I suppose the most charitable interpretation is that, even in the face of extreme awfulness by Sarah Vine, below-the-line Daily Mail commentators and other assorted racist, snobbish prudes, Meghan Markle is being supported by her new in-laws. Hell, there is a really awful sub-culture on Twitter of women who hate Meghan - they are racist, jealous and generally angry. Their comments in regard to the colour of her skin are not so much racist dogwhistles as honking great bullhorns.

For what it's worth, I like her - she comes across as fun, caring and a bit saucy. Anyone who upsets racists, snobs and prudes is fine by me. They are probably the same people who are, as I write this, whining about the multicultural BBC royal wedding coverage team - although I don't want to ruin my Saturday by going onto Twitter to see if there are idiots who are genuinely angry about the very presence of the gorgeous Naga Munchetty at Windsor Castle.

At the end of today, Meghan Markle will be the Duchess of Sussex - she has had to convert to the Church of England faith, if she has any children with Harry, they will join the in-line-to-the-throne production line and it is all part of an institution that is not based on merit, has only become moderately less sexist with the changes to primogeniture rules and could easily be thrown into confusion if an heir to the throne turns out to be gay. Her life will no longer be her own and everything she says, does and wears will be scrutinised for the rest of her life. I have no doubt that she will do what she can to continue the path of modernising the creaking old institution of the monarchy - and will probably be much quicker about choosing the causes she will support than Kate Middleton was.

Good for her and all that. Only a person with a truly rancid heart would wish Meghan and Harry a miserable marriage. Even a cranky old republican like me can smile at the sight of two people in love. If Meghan somehow brings down the monarchy, as the haters think she will, I would not be upset. But chances are, she won't cause the fall of the House of Windsor - and that will really annoy the haters.

Photography by Last Night of Freedom/Flickr

Updates on O2 and Hilary Mantel's excellent refusal to repent or recant

In the last couple of weeks, two of my blog posts have attracted a bit of attention. One was on my friend Briony's ongoing battles with the O2 phone company and another was on the misguided, ignorance-fuelled outrage over Hilary Mantel's 5,000-word essay on the bodies of royal women, including that of the Duchess of Cambridge (in case you didn't notice, she's having a baby...). Since then, there have been some developments.

Briony received unwanted marketing calls from O2 even though her preferences were set to "email contact only", she was baffled as to why personal details were required by unsolicited callers before she could be told about any special offers and, as a bonus, she discovered this very website was blocked by O2 as part of their nanny state-style filter for adult content, even on the phones of actual adults.

Now that Briony is in email and telephone contact with O2, she has still to hear about the amazing offers and can't seem to get an answer out of anyone as to what these were because it apparently changes on "what she wants to include in the scheme".  

She has received a number of spoken apologies and emails starting "We are really sorry" and "O2 takes these complaints seriously" and "we are speaking with the Social Media team about their lack of response/terminology" and "we are in contact with the customer service teams.."  But nothing really has changed.

Briony is now in contact with with Tracy and Carol from the "Escalation Team" - which makes me visualise women talking on the phone as they go up an escalator - and while both are "really very nice", Briony says neither "clearly can provide me with any answers as to why I was contacted/pestered when clearly I shouldn't have been." It would also appear that not much can be done to trace or find out why Briony received unwanted phonecalls in the first place.

On the upside, when Briony broached the subject of recompense for this two-week debacle, O2 asked her what she felt was a suitable remuneration for the day lost to O2 and Twitter, half a day lost to calls with the O2 Customer Service and half a day lost on emails/phone calls to the O2 Escalation Team.  Her response free upgrade and phone - after all, surely O2 were calling her about her upgrade in the first place, no?

So, she has received a couple of different offers, including O2 paying to end her current contract and not charge her for ending the contract early - but she'll have to pay for a new phone. The other offer includes more download capacity (but she'd better be careful not to try and download anything from any of the websites O2 blocks, even though she is an adult...) and no £6 monthly charge.

But for any recompense, Briony has to go into a shop, discuss the options, and tie herself into another O2 contract, when what she has really asked for is a 100% guarantee that her phone number will not be used in any further O2 marketing drives.  Alas, this could not be given, nor could a 95% guarantee, nor could an 80% or 70% guarantee be given... Briony gave up asking what kind of guarantee she could be assured at this time. What is the point of opting for email contact only if that isn't going to be respected by O2?

In conclusion, all of the deals on the table remain ambiguous and won't make a massive difference to her life. A better offer would surely involve stuff like a free upgrade (including handset) and a cheaper bill, so that Briony stays with O2 long term, thus everyone wins. 

This seems to be a struggle for O2, as even in compensation, they use the guise of giving with one hand, only to take a greater financial and contractual reward with the other.

In the meantime, I have just had the predictable "this is to protect the children" response from O2 when I called them out on their blocking of websites for adult customers. It's somewhat hilarious that my blog was blocked but it is also completely contrary to a free society. O2 offers parental controls so parents can ensure their kids can't access adult content on their phones so why they feel the need to restrict adult internet access is a mystery.

On the upside, Briony can vote with her money if she finds a better deal elsewhere. This is indeed a vast improvement on the government-run duopoly of the United Arab Emirates, where we both used to live. There you get the choice of two equally incompetent telecommunications companies, Etisalat and Du, and that is all.

As for Hilary Mantel, she has thankfully not apologised for her controversial 5,000-word essay, which she gave as a lecture two weeks before any of the newspapers noticed. Her unrepentant response is inspiring to anyone who has dared express an opinion only for it to be misunderstood by the moronic masses.

I will love her forever for this brilliant line: "I do think that the Duchess of Cambridge is an intelligent young woman, who, if she cares to read my essay, will see that I meant nothing but good to her."

If only O2 was as uncensored.


Image courtesy of www.kozzi.com

It's about time for another World of Stupid...

I was delighted to be described by one of my favourite tweeters, @MoronWatch, as a "freelance moron watcher". I do wish I was paid my usual freelance rate for watching morons - there are so many of them out there that it could be a fulltime job. But I digress... Here is the latest swag of morons from around the globe:

1. A US company, Solid Gold Bomb, came under fire this week for selling some rather awful T-shirts. In possibly the worst variation on the tiresome "Keep calm and carry on" genre, the T-shirts were printed with the slogans "Keep calm and rape a lot", "Keep calm and hit her", "Keep calm and grope a lot" and "Keep calm and knife her." Just as terrible as the T-shirts was Solid Gold Bomb's attempt at an apology:

The company claimed it had been "informed of the fact that we were selling an offensive T-shirt primarily in the UK" and said: "This has been immediately deleted as it was and had been automatically generated using a scripted computer process running against hundreds of thousands of dictionary words."

Really? A computer error just so happened to generate four moronic slogans and nobody noticed. Did the computer also post the T-shirts as being for sale on Amazon with no human noticing this at any stage of the process? What about when orders started coming in? Did anyone say: "Hang on, why are we selling rape T-shirts?" Here is some interesting stuff on blaming rape-apologist algorithms for all this. It is indeed a convenient way to not take any responsibility.

Or maybe someone at Solid Gold Bomb accidentally hit the "Create T-shirts for douchebags" button.

2. Hilary Mantel was again proven right this week. Her claim that society and the media are obsessed with royal women's bodies was strengthened by the vulture-like reporters hovering around London's King Edward VII Hospital where the Queen was recovering from a bout of gastroenteritis. Everyone seems to have forgotten how badly that all ended last time a royal woman was at King Edward VII  - the obsession with the Duchess of Cambridge's severe morning sickness took a dark turn with a prank call and a nurse committing suicide.

But royal gastrointestinal systems are clearly as newsworthy as royal wombs and the reporters gathered outside the hospital in case of, er, I dunno... In case the Queen's doctor was going to emerge with full details of Her Majesty's bowels? It was boring, stupid television and to waste hours of time hovering around an expensive hospital when the NHS is being undermined at every opportunity is rather obscene.

3. Speaking of which, the Huffington Post's UK outpost has developed a creepy obsession with the pregnant Duchess of Cambridge and other knocked-up celebs. "Baby bump" has become their equivalent of the Daily Mail's "all grown up". As well as Kate Middleton, Kim Kardashian, Imogen Thomas, Fergie from the Blackeyed Peas, Rochelle Humes from The Saturdays and a Chinese woman known only as "Zhang" all come up on a "baby bump" search of the website.

It's gross and what was extra-stupid was the headline: "Kate Middleton Pregnant: Duchess and 'Bump' Visit National Portrait Gallery." As if she could simply take it off! I know there are madder elements of the prolife movement who'd disagree with me, but I'm pretty sure the foetus isn't going to remember this trip to the art gallery.

Whoever managed their Twitter account thought "Kate Middleton takes her baby bump to a wedding" was a sane thing to say and that moronic sentence leads the article that was linked to the tweet. Again, it's not as if she really has a choice in that matter. But I am sure the bump had a tremendous time at the nuptials.

4. Just in case anyone out there is labouring under the misapprehension that human rights laws are a bad thing, we have sickening news from Saudi Arabia that transcends mere stupidity and drives straight into completely vile territory. Seven men convicted of armed robbery face execution by crucifixion and firing squad. Yes, crucifixion. Six have been sentenced to death by firing squad and the main defendant is scheduled to be executed by crucifixion. For three days.

The condemned men claim they have had no access to lawyers, confessions were extracted under torture and most of them were juveniles at the time of the offences. If you are OK with any of this, you are seriously not well.

5. The Merriam-Webster dictionary continues its murder of the English language by letting the moronic use of "literally" creep into its pages. Every day, people claim they are literally on fire, that they literally have work coming out of their arses and that they would literally die if something non-lethal happened. These people do not need to be encouraged by dictionaries. It literally has to stop.

6. I've spotted some insane sex advice from Cosmopolitan's UK website but I may save that for later...


Image courtesy of www.kozzi.com

Off with her head! Behold, it's Hilary Mantel hysteria!

Beheading people for treason isn't really the done thing in Britain these days. It is mildly terrifying that the last person executed in Britain for treason was not so long ago - it was William Joyce, hanged in 1946, the year my father was born. But even though treason is still an offence here, surely we are not interesting in reverting to the dark days of calling for people's heads to be severed from their necks. Or are we?

Given the kneejerk public reactions to the abysmal reporting of Hilary Mantel's erudite, fascinating and articulate London Review of Books Winter lecture, I am not so sure we have moved on from an era of hysterically waving pitchforks and wanting to see blood spilled as judicial entertainment.

The lecture, entitled Royal Bodies, actually took place two weeks ago so the journalists of the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Independent and Metro were not exactly on the ball. But a 5,000-word lecture, with all its nuances and historical context, does not make for a sexy news story. It is far easier to lazily pick the eyes out of the lecture, offer quotes out of context, get a shedload of easy hits to your website and watch as the easily outraged readers believe the shoddy journalism. Hell, it's not as if they're going to bother to read or hear what Mantel had to say.

And because Mantel dared to mention that most pristine and sacred of all media cows in her lecture, the Duchess of Cambridge, it was so easy to set her up as an object of hate. The lecture was an attack on the obsession by the media and the public with not just the body of Duchess of Cambridge but the bodies of royal women throughout the centuries. The fascination over whether Anne Boleyn was going to produce a male heir for Henry VIII in the sixteenth century is no different to the womb watching that Kate has to endure.

Of course, reading Mantel's well-written words was too hard for the foaming-at-the-mouth masses. It was far easier to look at the photo of Mantel, juxtaposed beside a winsome shot of the Duchess, and conclude that she is fat, unattractive and jealous of Kate's body and marriage. 

Never mind that Mantel has publicly spoken about her battle with endometriosis, a condition which has left her overweight and infertile. Never mind that she is the patron of an endometriosis charity. Never mind that she speaks with humour and grace on the trials and tribulations of being a large woman in a world were the sylph-like are worshipped. Never mind that Mantel has been married since 1972. It is clearly a resilient relationship - the marriage ended in divorce in 1979 but the couple then remarried. If Mantel was truly snide and vile, she might have alluded to the fact that she worked on her own marriage and gained a stronger relationship as a result, unlike many a disastrous royal union.

But in the minds of the angry mob, her only motivation for saying anything remotely critical of the saintly Duchess is jealousy and hatred. 

Even David Cameron felt the need to weigh in from India. Like almost everyone else who has shot their mouths and keyboard fingers off today, he obviously didn't bother to find out exactly what Mantel said and instead rose to her defence like a pathetic, populist knight in shining armour.

And then Ed Miliband took time out to defend Kate. Seriously, Ed, come on. There's an NHS to defend but instead, he also jumped aboard a populist steed of his own, donned the armour of lameness, and said: "These are pretty offensive remarks. I don't agree with them." Oh, and he added the usual mindless twaddle about how hard the Duchess works.

Have we reached a place where only thin, pretty women married to princes are allowed to comment on thin, pretty princesses? The furore echoes the sexist attempts to silence the brilliant Professor Mary Beard simply because she expressed a mildly controversial opinion and doesn't live up to some ridiculous standard of female hotness.

The defenders of Kate's virtue clearly didn't read to the very end of Mantel's piece because then they might have realised that she was calling for kindness towards the Duchess, for us to not be so obsessed by her body and the contents therein. 

In the last paragraph, this is what Mantel wrote: "We don't cut off the heads of royal ladies these days, but we do sacrifice them them, and we did memorably drive one to destruction a scant generation ago. History makes fools of us, makes puppets of us, often enough. But it doesn't have to repeat itself. In the current case, much lies within our control. I'm not asking for censorship. I'm not asking for pious humbug and smarmy reverence. I'm asking us to back off and not be brutes."

You'd be hard pressed to find a more eloquent way to tell the media and the public to not behave like voyeuristic dickheads where royal bodies are concerned. But you'd have to read 5,000 words, many of them with more than one syllable, to find this eloquence. Nah, it's much easier to simply swallow the moronic hysteria generated by lazy journalists and slag off the fat woman instead.


Image courtesy of www.kozzi.com

Prank calls, pregnancy and popular hypocrisy

Very few people were completely po-faced after hearing the prank call from Australian radio station 2Day FM to King Edward VII Hospital, where the Duchess of Cambridge was being treated for acute morning sickness. Prank calls are juvenile and frequently about as funny as burning orphans, but after it happened, there was plenty of chatter, largely along the lines of: "Well, it was an idiotic thing to do, but how lame was her impersonation of the Queen? And seriously, how stupid would someone have to be to fall for it? Hahahaha!"

Now that the nurse who answered the call and put it through to another nurse has committed suicide and a dreadful blame game is being publicly played, most of us are not laughing quite as hard. Nobody with any compassion would think that a silly mistake, even one as public as a prank call that went viral, should lead to one of the people involved paying the ultimate price.

But this awful situation has exposed awful hypocrisy on a global scale. Newspapers that we know have been involved in phone hacking are now coming over all self-righteous. These are the same newspapers that have employed staff who previously had no issue with hacking phones to get the kind of information that 2Day FM obtained in a prank call. These are the same newspapers who couldn't wait for the presses to roll after the story broke about the tapped phone conversation between Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles, featuring the infamous tampon remark. These are the same newspapers that have been obsessed with the Duchess of  Cambridge's uterus from the day she got married.

The cognitive dissonance required to simultaneously be horrified by Jacintha Saldanha's suicide and to continue to pry into the gynaecological business of the Duchess as well as other famous women is astounding.

The Guardian, meanwhile, as the chief cheerleader for the Leveson Inquiry, is also suitably dour about it all but not necessarily any less hypocritical. When the Leveson Inquiry was in full swing, The Guardian was the go-to paper for live updates as the testimonies took place. Except that on the one lonely day that the inquiry devoted itself to the portrayal of women in the media, The Guardian didn't bother with a live blog and coverage the next day was scant. It was the one day of the inquiry where the issues surrounding the news values of women's bodies were under the microscope and The Guardian was strangely silent.

But no amount of pontificating by Lord Justice Leveson or regulation of the press can shoot down the big elephant in the room - why we are so concerned with the intimate details of celebrity pregnancy in the first place. As long as the news about any famous pregnancy is obtained legally, there's not much that Leveson could have put in his 2,000-page report to stop intensely personal matters being made public. While the British public has a right to know that the Duchess of Cambridge is pregnant with an heir to the throne, we don't have any right to know intimate details about said pregnancy.

Not even the power, privilege and money of the royal family could guarantee the Duchess's stay in hospital would remain private in this internet era. As such, the pregnancy was announced before the end of the first trimester, just in case someone was tacky enough to leak pictures or information to the wider world. Kate could not enjoy the luxury the rest of us have of keeping her pregnancy quiet until the 12-week mark was safely passed. It's easy to call "first world pains" on that but it is a sad reflection on where we are as a society voraciously hungry for information that is none of our business.

Tellingly, the information contained in the prank call was pretty much already in the public domain. But at the time of writing, on Sunday, December 9, 2012, we should have still been in blissful ignorance about it all.

Morning sickness: it's a right royal romp!

Just when I thought today could not become any more idiotic, I get a press release in my inbox with the headline: MORNING SICKNESS REMEDIES FIT FOR A QUEEN.

Yes, that's right, people. The PR people for herbal remedy shills, Dr Stuart's, saw fit to jump on the baby-and-barf bandwagon. Using the Duchess of Cambridge's trip to hospital for hyperemesis gravidarum as the hook for the sales pitch, the oh-so-perky press release tells us that a cup of herbal tea will see you right if you're pregnant and puking. A brew of Dr Stuart's Ginger and Lemongrass is all you need.

Never mind that the Duchess is suffering a form of morning sickness that is so awful that it has been known to kill pregnant women, especially in centuries gone by. Never mind that women have actually terminated pregnancies because they could not cope with this particularly horrendous nausea. Why, all they should have done was had a jolly cup of tea! Silly women!

I have precisely no idea why one Lauren Soar of Manc Frank PR saw fit to add my name to her media list or why she thought it was at all big or clever to use debilitating morning sickness that generally requires hospitalisation, medication and a drip to try and promote a herbal tea. Raising awareness of a particularly hideous form of morning sickness is one thing. Trying to sell tea at the same time is quite another.

Now, I am quite the fan of ginger tea for sorting out upset tummies and hangovers, but pregnant women everywhere who are suffering from hyperemesis gravidarum generally need something a tad stronger to get over the condition.

Stay classy, Lauren. You've gotta love a PR who peddles dodgy medicine and jumps on a bandwagon that is already out of control and taking up way too much time on the news cycle to make a few bucks for a client... 

Image courtesy of www.kozzi.com

Royal womb watch - and the wombs that we really should be watching

We are living in an era of limited privacy, much of which we have brought upon ourselves with our assorted social media accounts and demand for information about things that are really none of our business. Such as the contents of the Duchess of Cambridge's uterus. The media feeding frenzy outside the hospital where she is being treated for hyperemesis gravidarum - acute morning sickness - has been predictable and repulsive.

Live blogs on newspaper websites and endless TV news coverage is erupting on a story that hasn't developed much in the past 24 hours. Today, we had a Sky News reporter offering us the non-news that William very quickly got out of a Range Rover and dashed into the hospital this morning wearing much the same outfit as he was wearing yesterday. Wow. Man wearing trousers and jumper gets out of a car and walks through a door. Groundbreaking.

But this is the level of banality we can expect until the baby is born, despite the fact that hyperemesis gravidarum is nobody's idea of fun and the Daily Mail running tripe like spooky computer-generated images of what the kid might look like is beyond absurd.

Even I, an avowed republican, wouldn't wish hyperemesis gravidarum on anyone. It is awful, it is debilitating, it is what killed Charlotte Bronte. But what I really wish is that every pregnant woman in Britain, and indeed the world, can access the same level of prenatal healthcare the Duchess is currently experiencing. Right now, St Helier hospital, the location of my nearest Accident and Emergency and maternity units, is under threat. A&E and maternity may yet be closed down in a warped attempt to save money. This is in spite of a rising birth rate in the area and a recent multi-million pound refurbishment to the maternity unit.

As such, you'll have to forgive me for not getting massively excited about the royal pregnancy announcement.  As I've said before, if they want privacy, they can simply renounce their claims to the throne and live as private citizens. If your response is: "Why should they do that? Why can't the media just leave them alone?", I agree, the wall-to-wall media coverage is an unnecessary invasion of privacy and bona fide news stories are missing out on valuable airtime. But if you've ever clicked on a link about the royal couple, you are part of the problem.

Besides, as British taxpayers, perhaps we do have a right to know about the prospect of another member that we will have to support. It is the equivalent of a pregnant woman being obliged to tell her employer that she is expecting.

Instead of getting excited about the royal pregnancy, it seems far saner for us to get excited about the pregnancies of our friends and family. The pregnant women and new mothers who are close to me have real lives, far removed from that of a Duchess. As such, they have to deal with issues such as maternity leave, which doctor and hospital to trust, budgeting for the new arrival, caring for children they may already have and what they can expect by giving birth under the NHS system.

The Duchess can "scale back her engagements" for the foreseeable future in a way that pregnant women who have to work for a living cannot. Chances are, with the best of British healthcare at her disposal, the royal foetus will be fine. It's the pregnant women around the world who may not be fine that truly deserve our attention.

______________________________

If you'd like to help pregnant women and new mothers around the world who are truly disadvantaged, I can highly recommend making a donation to help the amazing work done by MSF.


Image courtesy of www.kozzi.com

Not all boobs are created equal

Breasts have been getting plenty attention lately. First, there was the mass hysteria of Kate Middleton's royal breasts getting snapped by a paparazzi photographer. Then she was deemed a jolly good sport after she was greeted by bare-breasted women in the Solomon Islands.  Meanwhile, there is a campaign to get The Sun to drop the Page 3 girls. And, in case you weren't aware, October is Breast Cancer Awareness month

The outcry over topless Kate Middleton was hypocritical and hilarious. Unless she was a vocal campaigner against topless sunbathing, those photographs were not in the public interest. But the sanctimonious outrage of newspapers and magazines who routinely get copy sales and clicks from stories about famous women's body parts was pathetic. Close-ups of cellulite, speculation over baby bumps, scrutiny over weight gain, mock concern over weight loss, expert commentary from cosmetic surgeons as to whether implants/Botox/fillers/facelifts have happened - apparently these invasions of privacy are completely newsworthy and not at all demeaning. But as soon as a French magazine published topless royal boobs, the pearls were clutched so hard they were ground to a fine powder.

Then Kate met topless women in Solomon Islands and she was congratulated on how well she handled that encounter. Naturally, she smiled demurely and averted her eyes. Did anyone seriously she think she would point, guffaw and say something completely heinous like: "I was hoping to get mine as tanned as yours!" like a grotesque female equivalent of Prince Phillip?

And the women of the Solomon Islands were consenting to being photographed bare-breasted. As are the women on Page 3 of The Sun. There is a reasonably lively online campaign to get The Sun to ditch the Page 3 Girl. As of today, about 40,000 people have signed up. But The Sun is a business, not a charity. If they are not haemorrhaging advertisers over the Page 3 campaign, the topless lovelies are likely to stay, regardless of online signatures from people who probably don't buy The Sun and don't click on the website.

The Sun could quite possibly lose the Page 3 Girl from the print edition (but keep her on the website where there is money to be made from mobile phone downloads at £1.50 a pop...) without any real impact on revenue. Perhaps that large chunk of page 3 would be better dedicated to actual news. Hell, what is more offensive here? The bare breasts or the little caption alongside featuring a made-up intellectual quote attributed to Michelle of Essex? Because obviously a woman couldn't possibly be hot and have the capacity to form an intelligent opinion, right?

There is a part of me that is always amused whenever I have a greasy breakfast at the cafe around the corner from my house and the tradesmen reading The Sun don't appear to particularly notice the Page 3 Girl. I've never seen one of these men openly leer at her. She has become part of the British landscape - it could be argued that it is good that breasts are not freaking out people in a puritanical manner. Others might argue she has become invisible and that is equally degrading to women.

Page 3 mostly strikes me as something that was a bit cheeky and mildly amusing in the 70s but these days, it's all a bit tired, like some lame joke your dad might tell every Christmas as he carves the turkey breast. On those grounds, I'd probably retire the Page 3 Girl if I was editor of The Sun. But I'm not, and I doubt Dominic Mohan is losing sleep over the Stop Page 3 campaign.

These last seven paragraphs have been devoted to tits as titillation, to the morality and public interest of photographs of breasts. The debates that rage over these issues focus on breasts as sexual things, as objects to perve on great and small. But it's Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The notion that most of us are already aware of breast cancer is a cynical viewpoint steeped in westernised privilege.

There are plenty of places where there is poor awareness, poor screening and a culture of shame surrounding breast cancer. It is the opposite end of the Page 3 spectrum. A fabulous, feisty friend of mine in the United Arab Emirates used to give breast cancer education sessions to Emirati women and she told me how so many of them would get embarrassed. Women would giggle, run out of the room when the video was played and freak out at the thought of self-examination.

Supporting breast cancer education in countries such as the UAE, and indeed anywhere in the world where it can be culturally difficult to talk openly about breasts, would be a fantastic way to get behind Breast Cancer Awareness Month (or, indeed, at any other time of year because, you know, cancer doesn't stick to a schedule). Please get in touch with me if you'd like to do this, I have contacts.

Or you could make a direct donation to a research facility rather than buying something pink and then finding out that only a tiny proportion of profits actually go where it's needed. Or buying pink-branded make-up for breast cancer only to discover that it contains carcinogens (this has actually happened...). Be smart about your cancer charity donations. A direct donation is better than a Facebook in-joke about handbags or shoes to raise awareness. The voyeurs will certainly appreciate the preservation of breasts, but good human beings will just be glad if women's lives are saved.