Terry Eagleton 'You are socially disadvantaged'
Dear Royal Baby,
When you grow up, you will probably come across the kind of science-fiction scenario in which one encounters men and women who seem to be human, but who occasionally betray the fact that they are actually aliens. It may be by a word slightly mispronounced, a tiny drop of green blood, a tea cup held at a bizarre angle or a chance revelation that they have no idea what unemployment benefit is. At this point in a science-fiction movie, a sinisterly dissonant chord will be heard on the soundtrack.
I'm talking, I'm afraid to say, about your immediate family. Be in no doubt that they will strain every sinew to present themselves as normal human beings. In these democratic days, their survival as wealthy parasites vitally depends on it. They will encourage you to slur your vowels, stick a button through your nose and make endless, tedious visits to homeless shelters. Your real life – puking in posh nightclubs, having your bum wiped by a valet, slaughtering harmless animals in the Scottish Highlands – will be kept carefully under wraps.
If you value your sanity, try not to let any of this fool you. Never forget that those around you are not what they seem. When they try to persuade you that you are just a regular kid hanging around an average-size palace, remember the bitter truth that you are a socially disadvantaged child. Surrounded by boneheaded, emotionally constipated relatives, not least by great-grandparents who seem to have as much inner life as a fruit bat, you will be given the worst possible start in life. You have been born into a class for which social mobility is an idle dream. Years of intensive therapy are unlike to offset the damage of being sent to a failing school where most of your fellow-pupils are the children of dukes and stockbrokers and the fees are £30,000 a year. None of your friends will have heard of Les Dawson or Leon Trotsky. Try as you may to break out of this impoverished background, you will probably never travel on a bus, buy yourself a Mars bar or know who Toni Morrison is. I wish I could advise you on how to handle all this, but I can't. It's fated. You're screwed.
Terry Eagleton
Curtis Sittenfeld: 'What exactly do you guys do?
Dear Royal Baby,
Greetings and salutations, royal baby! Welcome to the world. As the mother of two-year-old and four-year-old girls, I've spent much of the recent past around your kind, and I'd like to offer you some tips. We'll go in chronological order.
1 If breastfeeding works for you and your mother, great. If it doesn't work for you, you'll also be just fine. Don't let anyone make either of you feel like not breastfeeding is a moral failure.
2 For transportation, I think you'll find the Ergo brand baby carrier most comfortable, and your parents will find it simplest to use. When you're a newborn, you'll likely want to be held as often as possible, and such carriers allow this without immobilising the grownups around you. Perhaps your grandparents can even get in on the action?
3 As a first book, I recommend Woof-Woof by Sami. What it's lacking in plot and character development – it has only about 10 words, mostly animal noises – it makes up for with its boldly contrasting illustrations: a big-headed dog, a big-headed pig, a big-headed duck … you get the idea. I don't want to give away the ending, but there's also a baby in there, and we all know that there's nothing a baby likes more than another baby.
4 As your literary taste becomes increasingly sophisticated, I can't emphasise this enough: rhyming books are far more tolerable, dare I even say pleasurable, for adults to read a thousand times than non-rhyming books. I'm not sure why this is, but please be considerate. Embrace Dr Seuss. Jamberry is also an excellent pick, as are Each Peach Pear Plum, Barnyard Dance and Is Your Mama a Llama? (I mean no disrespect here; your mama, obviously, is not a llama.)
5 When you're being fussy, as you inevitably will, see if you can get a grownup to take you outside. The shift in environment can be both distracting and calming. I hear the grounds of Kensington Palace are quite nice.
6 Get on a schedule, especially a sleep schedule. Consistency will make you more agreeable, and your agreeability will make your parents' life infinitely more pleasant.
7 Is it too much to ask – and no rush – that at some point as you mature, you can explain to me why we're all obsessed with your family? Granted, I'm an American. And I definitely think your mother is pretty and stylish. But what exactly do you guys do? Again, no pressure – just, if you can figure this out, maybe let me know?
8 Ignore the advice of people like me. You'll be subjected to a magnitude of attention from media and the public that's unimaginable to most of us. You will be admired and criticised, fawned over and photographed. But you're not a symbol. You're a person. Go about the business of growing up, and let the frenzy surrounding your existence be an absurd and distant spectacle.
Best regards,
Curtis Sittenfeld
Jennie Bond: 'I knew your grandmother'
Hello!
They call you the "royal baby". Not that you have any idea yet of what that means or how you have been singled out, by a pure accident of birth, to take your place in history.
You are an anachronism in this increasingly egalitarian world and there are those who wish you will never take up the role into which you have been born. But I believe that perhaps 50 years from now, you will indeed become the sovereign and head of state of this country.
Your great-granny has played an absolute blinder during the past 60 years or so. You should have seen the crowds who turned out to celebrate her jubilee! And, although lots of people disagree with me, I think your grandpa Charles will make a decent king – and, as for your dad, he is already a bit of a superstar all around the world.
But I must warn you that this is not going to be an easy gig. That soft, baby skin of yours is going to have to toughen up pretty quickly. Your life, sadly for you, is never going to be your own. People will want to know everything about you and cameras will watch your every move.
Oh, you'll have fabulous wealth and an absurdly privileged lifestyle – but it will come at a steep price. I'm afraid you have no choice about your destiny. Your job description is already writ large: monarch. Not for you the thrill of compiling a CV, chasing a job and finding the career path that gives you satisfaction. Nor, indeed, the character-building chance to fail.
You are already a little king or queen. Your destiny is sealed, you have been born to swim in the royal goldfish bowl and your privacy is practically non-existent.
I knew your grandmother, Diana. She was a feisty, fragile woman and she would have been overjoyed to see you. She taught the rest of your family a lot about connecting with society and making the monarchy less stuffy. She would have picked you up in her arms and given you big hugs. Single handedly she almost brought the monarchy to its knees (one day you'll learn all about it). But she also cared about it deeply and her wish for you, like mine, would have been for you to make sure that the monarchy moves with the times and stays relevant.
Otherwise, you could find that you suddenly do have a career choice after all.
Best of luck,
Jennie Bond
Hugh Muir: 'The cord needs cutting; you might wield the scissors'
Welcome Royal Newcomer,
You kept us waiting, but then that is one of the privileges. As you will find, there are many of them. You will learn the family trick of enjoying and making light of them at the same time.
So what is the maelstrom you have been plunged into? Well, it could be worse. Twenty-first-century Britain can be a difficult, rumbustious place and, it certainly has some way to go before all of its citizens can be assured of anything like the kind of life you're going to have. Everyone's a bit nervy right now because a small group who juggled finances for a living dropped them all and made a terrible mess that we all had to clean up. By the time you're reading, you'll be reading all about it. But you've been born into a resilient sort of nation so we'll make do. There'll always be cash enough for Trooping the Colour.
Generally, it is a nation with its heart in the right place. A bit stuck in its ways and still trying to find a guiding philosophy in politics and social affairs, but it tries to do the right thing, and it certainly likes to be thought of as doing the right thing. Churchill – a heroic old guy your great grandma will tell you about if she gets the chance – once said the Americans will always do the right thing, having exhausted the alternatives. Often we're much the same. But that's not to be sniffed at.
There really is no telling what the country will look like by the time you come of age. Your father is 31 now and parts of the Kingdom have changed beyond recognition in that time. We moan a lot about life on our small island and about each other, but a lot of people from countries around the world think this country and its people and its philosophies are worth being part of. When it works, they come, add a bit, change a bit to smooth the transition and the country changes a bit as well; most say for the better.
Generally speaking, your folks – on your dad's side – have coped with this quite well; but then they travel a lot, so the differences don't seem daunting and they live in palaces, so they are protected from the unfortunate complexities. You'll have the advantage of being born into this Britain, and that being so, you may one day be able to nudge those bits of the establishment that yearn for a time that's past; one that was scarcely as they remember it and one that would be ruinous to return to. The cord needs cutting; you might wield the scissors.
And one more thing: should your great-grandad ever proffer advice on these matters, by letter, by note perhaps, don't listen.
Hugh Muir
Suri Cruise: 'Never take fashion advice from Beatrice and Eugenie'
Your Royal Highness,
Well, I got through that opening without breaking my pencil, so I guess that's something. I've been wondering for months – nay, years – how I would feel on this day, and the truth is, I am doing OK. How are you doing? Are you as svelte as everyone predicted you'd be? Are you ginger? What is your name?
Because I am the bigger person – both literally and figuratively – I'm going to give you a few pieces of advice as you begin your life as the second-most important child in the world. That's right, little Prince, you may have to bow to Camilla, but you are more important than Beyoncé's baby now.
Befriend most of the Beckhams. The Beckham boys know how to properly use their silverware, so they won't embarrass you, but Baby Harper is still kind of a mess.
Don't believe your own hype. Sure, everyone is going to fall all over themselves about your clothes and your hair and how cute your father looks when he's holding you. But you are just the future King, so don't get too carried away.
Start dressing yourself as soon as your eyes can differentiate colour. Don't become a victim of poor grownup taste. Never, under any circumstances, take fashion advice from Beatrice and Eugenie. I really can't stress this enough.
In closing, I would simply caution you not to let this whole "royal baby" thing go to your head. I've been here a lot longer than you have, I have a lot of connections, and my tiaras are just as shiny as yours. And they aren't secondhand. Feel free to have your people call my people if you need advice. Perhaps together we can usher in a new era of transatlantic diplomacy, like a modern-day Roosevelt and Churchill, only with better hats.
All the best,
Suri Cruise (via Suri's Burn Book)
Lucy Mangan: 'When you're bigger, track down Sarah Ferguson'
Dear Baby,
I'm going to assume you will be ascribed the appropriate flunkeys in posset-resistant periwigs to school you in the basics. The 10 best ways to get in and out of a pram while maintaining regal dignity. Distinguishing between the Iced Gems and the real gems you get hold of during illicit rootles round in great-grandma's handbag. The most winsome way to smile in non-Duchy-holding-grandma's iPhone snaps. The most winsome way to smile after those snaps end up on her Party Pieces website. That sort of thing.
After that, there's some stuff that's really just down to luck. Will you have a profile that comes out well on coins and stamps or should you hope that the Zuckervoss dollarbit has supplanted all lesser currencies by the time you grow up? Will you avoid male-pattern baldness? Will you look patently absurd in dress uniform like your great-uncle Andrew or eternally dashing like your great-grandad Philip?
Time alone will tell.
For the rest of it – dude, I wish I knew what to say to you. You're being born into a family that, as comedian Nick Doody once pointed out, thinks it has magic blood. How you're meant to deal with that in an essentially rational age, I do not know. For the next 60 years or so you will be groomed by them to take over as the constitutional monarch of 16 sovereign states, a process that sent your most of your ancestral line bonkers to one or other degree. (Remember that when Grandpa Bigears tries to swap your rusks for organic Hebridean kale patties and make sure you scream the place down.) When you're bigger track down an old lady called Sarah Ferguson. She'll probably be working at the Tesco where Coutts used to be. She'll tell you some tales that'll make your hair curl.
You've been born into one of the stranger parts of a strange, strange world. The royal family is, in essence, the spleen of the national corpus. You could be removed without any danger to life as we know it, but it might not function as smoothly without you. So unless and until you are irreparably damaged, it makes no sense to excise you.
While you remain, you will be followed, praised, scorned, exalted, pitied, revered, despised – all within the space of a single issue of the Daily Mail. From the moment you are born until the moment you die your every public and most of your private actions will be noted, your every word recorded, every decision dissected, every outfit catalogued, every glance pondered, every smile and every scowl scrutinised and picked over by a ravenous horde of followers to whom you mean something so profound it cannot be articulated or so superficial it's not worth the bother. But the depredations they carry out on your privacy and soul will be the same.
Whether the riches and privileges that also attend the accident of your birth can make up for this, only you will be able to decide. Once you have decided, of course, there will be bugger all you can do about it. It's not worth trying to run. People still think they've found Lord Lucan and that's on the basis of one grainy photo from 1974. Imagine how quickly they'd have tracked down the real thing if they'd had a globally disseminated set of digital images of his first 30 years to go by?
Maybe none of this will matter. Maybe all that matters is that your parents hoped for you, wanted you and now they love you, more than life itself. I hope so. Because otherwise, you poor little morsel, I wouldn't wish your fate on anyone.
I raise a commemorative mug and wish you the very best of luck.
Lucy Mangan
Geoff Dyer: 'Abdicate – become the first republican royal'
Dear Prince of Cambridge,
Welcome! It's a truly great planet – most of the others don't come within a million miles of it – and I'm sure you'll enjoy your stay here. But that heartfelt hope is not unqualified, is entirely conditional, in fact. The condition is that you abdicate as soon as you get the chance. That you voluntarily renounce all of the privileges that come with the mere fact of being born into the royal family. Your education will teach you that being born is just the start of a life, not its purpose. And it's not enough that you turn your back on the perks of monarchy. No, it's my dream that you'll become the first republican royal. So I hope you won't just say "It's not for me, thank you", but that it's not for anyone, that it's absurd and embarrassing to carry on this farce into the 21st century.
At the risk of seeming pushy, let me add that I hope, too, that you won't just renounce your title and embrace leftish views. Democratise yourself early on and you'll have a much better time of it here on earth. Almost all the happiness in life comes not from exclusivity – and there's nothing more exclusive than being a king or queen - but from inclusivity. Take the tube and use the bus. You won't need a car. Your Zone 1 home, after all, could hardly be more conveniently located. Rest assured, we've no intention of turfing you out – but you will have to pay the market rate.
Going back to cars for a moment, I take pride in the fact that when your grandad and step-grandma accidentally drove into the middle of a demo in London it's the voice of a personal friend of mine – his last name is King, ironically – that you can hear saying "Off with their heads!" on the video footage. He didn't mean it literally but it's a vocal reminder that while we're spoon-fed a lot of pap about the hard-working royals the truth is that a significant portion of the population sees your tribe for what they are: a top-of-the-Range-Rover bunch of spongers and welfare dependants.
Lest we end on a negative note, however, here's some encouraging news. Genetically, you've drawn a pretty short straw. Many of your ancestors have the intellectual and physical appeal of the hillbillies in Deliverance – minus the musical skill. Take your charming great-uncle Andrew, for example. What a stout advertisement for the mental, physical and moral benefits of republicanism! But don't worry about that clodhopper. Everyone has stupid and embarrassing relatives: the great thing about life is that whatever is passed on to you genetically, the shared inheritance of history argues with ever-increasing force that it's what you make of yourself that counts. In America they still cling to the quaint idea that anyone can become president. But we in Britain cherish an equally rousing hope of our own: that even kings and queens might one day become simply citizens.
Yours hopefully
Geoff Dyer
Nikesh Shukla: 'Earn your place on that stamp'
Dear Baby,
Britain's changed a lot since you all had any real power and it's best not to piss off the natives, multicultural as we are, because we're still hurting from the British Empire. Here's a good thing you could do. How about when you're doing your yearly honours list of footballers, X Factor contestants and people who have worked for worthwhile causes for the past 20 years, you could come up with a new title for it. Order of the British Empire? That's not a symbolic piece of history we want to retain. We're barely retaining you as it is.
To paraphrase the great Chuck D from Public Enemy, none of my heroes have appeared on no stamps. So I put this to you … by the time it's your time to be on a stamp, make sure you've done something heroic. Earn your place on that stamp.
Fight the power,
Nikesh Shukla
Tim Dowling: 'You deserve better'
Dear Heir,
First of all, please allow me to apologise. You didn't ask to be born. You especially didn't ask to be become the newest member of Britain's weirdest family. None of this is your fault.
I sincerely hope that over the next decade or two Britain's obsession with its royals will develop into something a bit less creepy, but that does not seem to be the way things are heading. While it may be a source of great national pride, your arrival serves a purpose that is neither altogether wholesome, nor in your interest.
Your future has been set in stone – unchangeable – at birth, a fate we have tried in vain to spare our poorest children. To be rich and posh and have such comparatively limited options – you may come to feel you've been singled out for punishment, as revenge. Like any baby, you deserve better.
I can only wish you one thing in good conscience: a lucky escape. Shirk duty, renounce destiny, ignore advice, taste ambition and be whatever you want to be. Remember: your parents can afford to support you through any number of unpaid internships.
All the best,
Tim Dowling
