Details have been delivered of an intimate lunch meeting between Kate Middleton and King Charles before her cancer reveal. When members of the royal family converse with the public, the most interesting trivialities and details can emerge from their mouth.
Last week, Prince William revealed that he thinks it is important to converse with sheep, that he used to like resting near his pony and basically spooning it, and that after a long day of distributing MBEs, he can be found cleaning his kids’ guinea pig cage. Hopefully, William, regardless of having sold his Polo horses a long time ago, actually has at least one filly to spoon.
So now that one patient at Windsor has been cleared to go back to work, when will the eager cameras of the media, the wall of iPhones held high, the internet, and the rest of the world see Kate again? When might the princess be able to return to her day job of driving an armored Range Rover to do her part in the community? Assuming we run the numbers and look forward, it could well be no less than four, if not five, months at the very earliest that Kate gets back to the public eye.
Next week, we’ll see the return from Regal Nursery party season, signaling the starting gun being fired on the Royal Family’s most active season. Palace garden parties in London and Edinburgh, the Chelsea Flower Show, Royal Ascot, Order of the Garter Day, Trooping the Color, Wimbledon, and the 77th anniversary of the D-Day Landings in Normandy will all take place between now and July.
Given the timeline this year, it seems likely that Kate will not attend any of these events. You won’t believe it, but there won’t be any Kate. If this works out, the very earliest we could see the Princess of Ribs return to work would be in September, after the Windsors take their annual six-plus-week summer hauls, a part of which is compulsory for them to spend in Scotland, doing battle with gorse prickles.
With Charles’s relaunch this week, what is clear is that Buckingham and Kensington Palaces have adopted contrasting approaches as their occupants face down the C-word. Since the king’s doctors said that he wouldn’t be able to get close to sick people in February, His Majesty has been making more appearances on social media.
The official royal family accounts have been posting pictures of the 75-year-old working hard in Bess. No elasticized lounging pants for a sick monarch. In the meantime, the line being put about the palace has been that even when the king isn’t doing these ambassadorial meet-and-greets, and an associate is quietly answering his question about what an Instagram is, he is in the middle of beavering away at state reports and having meetings with his confidential secretary in greatness, Sir Clive Alderon.
Now, after just three months, Charles has received the medical approval to hurl himself back into the thick of it this week, with him and Queen Camilla visiting a London cancer center and looking happier than that one time a zealous equerry proposed to torch the Tate Modern for him. This mission of keeping up with maximum visibility is the opposite of that adopted by Kate, who has been kept quiet more firmly than someone who has gone into witness protection.
Winds are security here. We are in May, and the princess has been witnessed on just four occasions. In that contentious Mother’s Day photo, she is an instinctual blobby shadow in William’s car’s back.
