The Sophist 13: Unlucky for some

On cursing a man.

They said in the Guardian today that there were chants of “We Want Fergie” on the streets of York when Prince Andrew visited in 1987, though I don’t remember those. I do recall, though, that when he came over to talk to me, an eleven-year-old standing behind the crowd barriers clutching something for him, a great hope surged within me that she would follow. 

Sarah Ferguson was the real catch, the celebrity, with her caravan of red hair and that enormous smile that seemed not to have been flattened by her first year in a royal marriage. She was a pan of water coming up to boil; not yet the lobster inside it. He was merely the prince who walked alongside her, and now they were also the Duke and Duchess of York, which was why they had come to visit our city. 

(Photo credits: David Cooper for Alamy. And no I’m not in it.)

The radio said they were in town, and I told my surprised mother that we absolutely had to go, please please please. (My parents, always very involved in leftwing politics, were hardly of the royalist persuasion. I had similarly begged my mum to drive me to Harrogate when the Pope had visited Yorkshire a year or two previously, and if we weren’t monarchists we definitely weren’t Catholics. She kindly indulged me on both occasions, with a slight air of bafflement.)

But these were famous people! From the news! From the world that I wanted to move towards, where everybody glowed, and was heard, and did the things that were talked about, rather than did the talking about them. York felt like a talking town but I wanted the doing. I wanted their glow to rub off on me. 

So we rushed into town with not much time to waste, to join the crowds and see if we could spot the Royals on their walkabout near the Minster. (You might call it a cathedral but everything has to be different in York, we’re like an entire Brexit of our own.) And as we dashed along Petergate, one of the streets that leads to the Minster, a gypsy stopped my mum and asked her if she’d like to buy some lucky heather. My mum knew better than to say no to the woman who had already pressed the twigs halfway into her palm, so she found a 50p or perhaps a pound note and gave it to her, passing the heather on to me as we legged it again. 

And somehow we found a space at the very front of the crowd, and there they were, Fergie and Andy, walking right in front of us! So I stuck out my hand and said “Have this, it’s lucky heather!” And Andrew reached his hand out for it, and said “Thankyou, what is it?” And I said, it’s lucky heather. And he said thankyou. And then he turned back, having actually gone beyond us by this point, and said, what is it? He looked confused. And I said, it’s lucky heather. For a third time. 

I realised then that there was a chance that I was dealing with a moron. 

And we never did meet Fergie. And being the eleven-year-old girl who was chosen by the Prince has lost, I will concede, some of its lustre, recently.

But I was glad to have palmed those scratchy branches off onto him, because neither my mum nor I wanted to keep them, and after he took the heather into his hands his life went through one terrible decision after the next, and Fergie’s did too, and now this horrible stuff turns out to have been going on with Epstein and that utterly vile world. And I realise now that when the woman told us the heather was lucky, she didn’t specify whether the luck would be good or bad. 

But I also know that we, the people, have to let them go, all of the Royals, all of this. Royalty is a curse that we have chosen for them. We give them these ridiculous privileges and then we express astonishment when they believe themselves to be above the usual rules, or to talk a load of absolute rubbish on Newsnight, or to lie and lie and treat other humans as lesser. Prince Harry said they were all in a trap, and while I’ve heard enough from him lately - well he’s not wrong, is he? But it’s a trap that most Royals believe we want them to stay in. And that I personally wouldn’t wish on anyone. Would you? 

Don’t say that you’d be extremely happy with all those palaces to live in, thankyou very much. You wouldn’t. What you want is a massive house full of beautiful things and someone to do all the cooking and gardening and drive you around and pay your bills. We all do. But nobody actually wants to live in a palace, unable to escape the expectations of their great-great-great grandparents, who are lurking on the walls like dry rot.

For almost twenty years I have interviewed famous people for a living. I got as near to their glow as I could. And I’ll tell you this about public figures: I’m not sure that they’re ok, or that I want to ask them about their fame any more. They’re not glowing, they’re sweating. Except Prince Andrew says he can’t even do that, on account of the moisture not passing through his lizard gills, or something.

The City of York said today that they are going to rescind the Freedom of the City that they gave to him in 1987, when he stepped inside the Minster, and see if he can be stripped of the Duke of York bit of his title too, as the Queen apparently couldn’t do that when she took his other royal bobbins away. Virginia Giuffre and other victims of Epstein have had to go through huge, globally humiliating efforts to find justice. It is they who have brought him down. But I’d also like to wonder, in my delusional way, if a Romany woman and her unwitting eleven-year-old conduit had a little something to do with it too.