One last slice of Royal Wedding cake
Grazia , the magazine for women with too short an attention span to handle Marie Claire, dedicated an entire issue to the nuptials of Kate and Wills.
Most of it is what you’d expect: the big day, how hot was Pippa?, couples who also got married that day, how to have your own royal do, how to ape British style queens (one day I will actually bother to find out what Alexa Chung does besides appear in best-dressed lists), but two stories stood out in the oh-for-the-love-of-god stakes, although for different reasons.
The first was “They Partied As Hard As The Rest of Us” by Helen McArdle, who the stand first tells us “shared a college residence with Kate and William at university - and watched their love blossom”. What it actually is is 800 or so words from someone who ate breakfast in the hall and thought they seemed nice, though Kate was a bit quiet. There is a photo of two girls in a bar, with the peerless caption “If you look hard enough, you can just make Kate out in this snap from a [college] dinner”. It’s all very snuggly - except for the par about one night when the author (studying for her exams like a good girl) her a “commotion” in the corridor and “looked out to see Kate - too drunk to walk - being carried back to her room”. But she watched their wedding on the tele, you know, and they were just another couple from college! Touching. The article also tells me that William thought one of the chicks from S Club 7 was hot, and, also, that he was friends with a lot of posh people.
This is followed a few pages on by the sort of story that makes you think you should call your parents and tell them that they got off easy as far as your moronic post-teen years were concerned. I spent my early twenties holding up various bars in Newtown while chainsmoking and back-combing my hair; clearly this is time I could have spent in London chasing down my own prince charming, as “Inside the Minds of the Harry Hunters: William may be off the market but that’s just made his brother all the more available” tells me (NB: This article is actually hilarious and well-written). It turns out there are American girls (now, I have no idea of how much of a phenomenon this is, but even if it’s just the four chicks in this piece, I’m slightly horrified) who spend all of their free time in England, trying to pin down Prince Harry.
“21-year-old Courtney has moved from her home in California to London with the ambition of meeting the prince. She’s done her research, poring over blogs and reading magazines to learn where he’s most likely to be seen… and she’s prepared to invest - after all, drinks and entry to the city’s top clubs don’t come cheap. And she’s not alone.”
“Taylor MCKinley, 21, is a student in the US but is spending a year studying at the University of Leicester, two hours outside London so that she can be in with a chance of meeting Harry. She reads magazines with names like Majesty and Royalty and has studied the history of the monarchy. At school she abstained from dating because she was ‘holding out for royalty’.”
And so on. I mean, this is just awful. The bloke has a girlfriend for a start, but the self-delusion is terribly sad. I can’t imagine why young girls with bright minds would get the idea that they could be a princess one day, or that it was something to aspire to.
(PS: I tried to get links for the above mentioned stories but the Grazia website makes my eyes bleed. But it turns out that Harry Hunters are indeed a THING )
