Kate Middleton Pregnancy Watch: The Columnists who spend hundreds of words ignoring her
KATE Middleton Pregnancy Watch: The Columnists ignore Kate Middleton:
John Walsh (Indy): He began his words on world’s news by telling reader on December 3:
Extinguish all rational thought. Abandon all hope that the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement will make the front pages this week. Stand aside, Leveson Inquiry and its fretful consequences. There’s a royal foetus out there and it’s instantly eclipsed all other news.
On the same day as Walsh was proving his point in a few hundred words, Zoe Williams hammered out a few hundred words of her own for Guardian readers on how she doesn’t care for Kate:
Kate Middleton’s pregnancy: 10 stories I don’t want to read – From baby name suggestions to speculation about Pippa, there are some articles that should remain in the writer’s imagination
Williams then spends her time writing about things she’s thought about what doesn’t want to read other people writing about:
1. An endless list of things she shouldn’t be eating or drinking …You read this incessantly – “Peaches Geldof will be particularly keen to avoid alcohol”; “Sophie Dahl especially won’t want to eat bagged salad…
Salad, you say?
2. Anything at all about their sex life – If there is one thing more nauseating than a mumsy tip about positioning round a bump, and I am leaning away from my computer and wincing even as I type that, it is the unbidden image of Prince William having sex with anyone, of any shape…
See above.
3. Speculation about whether it’s a boy or a girl – I had a friend who, when asked if it was a boy or a girl, used to say “I hope so”, and then make a sarcastic face.
Sarcastic face.
4. Suggestions for baby names – The royal family actually invented a crude version of the internet, some centuries ago: the Posh Name Generator. It gave you a list of four names, Elizabeth, Henry, James or Mary…
Any more suggestions?
5. How soon Pippa Middleton will want to get pregnant
6. Anything that mistakes hyperemesis gravidarum for “bad morning sickness” – It is like mistaking pneumonia for “a bad cold”.
7. How hyperemesis gravidarum is actually quite good for keeping the weight off, if you manage it correctly
8. An imaginative reconstruction of how Diana would take the news, were she still alive – She would greet the news just like anybody else who’s ever been given this news.
No need to imagine. Williams knows.
9. Fashion-related comments wondering “whither the modest frock dress?” one day, and “why can’t you be sexy-pregnant, like that nice Megan Fox?” the next – If fashion can’t agree – which it can’t – then it should discuss something else.
Discuss.
10. Any article headlined “Dilatey-Katey”
Three days later and the Telegraph’s Allison Pearson was taking a view about not taking a view:
Back off, people – the Duchess of Cambridge is not a brood mare
Pearson backs off – to get a better view:
…The foetus currently measures about an inch and its feet are starting to lose their webbed appearance…The textbooks tell us that the hands can now bend at the wrist, though, obviously, it will be many years before the little prince or princess gets the hang of that weird, window-cleaning Royal Wave. Give it time…The couple didn’t plan on making the pregnancy public until Christmas, when they could have had a scan and been pretty confident that all was well. No chance of that now. Not when the tiny creature, oblivious in its amniotic pool, is already declared third in line to the throne, and historians on the radio speculate as to how old he or she will be when they finally inherit the Crown. Maybe 70, or even 80, if the Windsor longevity continues, they say. And it’s at this point that you yell at the radio and tell the historians to shut up.
Shunt up! Or carry on writing:
…If you were her, still in that anxious first trimester and in hospital with your head stuck in a grey cardboard vomit carton and your arm hooked up to fluids, how much would you want millions of people speculating about your insides and choosing your baby’s name for you? Me neither.
Grace Dent then noted in the Indy:
Who exactly is supposed to be interested in Kate’s baby? Not me – and not anyone I know
Dent then informs her readers that she, gay men, straight men don’t care about Kate’s womb.
I Don’t Care About Kate Middleton’s Pregnancy Because I Care About Freedom
Freedom to write a few hunders word on Kate’s pregnancy…
Posted: 12th, December 2012 | In: Royal Family Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
