The Wedding

If I were a young woman - I'm not a woman or young, by the way - I wouldn't like to be in Kate Middleton's shoes, metaphorically speaking. No wonder she's supposedly not eating these days. God! She'll be joining The Firm is a few days' time and there's no bigger firm - or soap opera - than that. Those palaces where people live! Those large dining rooms where the knives, forks and spoons are laid out military style. The corridors you have to walk to get from one room to another. All those flunkies about the place bowing and scraping to you with, possibly, pervy little smiles on their mouths that tells you that you really are not fine enough to be in this hallowed place with these hallowed people.... and so on.
She seems a nice girl but will she stay a nice girl living the sort of life she will have to live soon. If she decides to continue "being herself" she'll suffer - "we don't want royalty to be anything other than royal, old boy". She's a commoner but she can't stay a commoner because a commoner to some of those soon to be around her is to be common.
Will she survive in the airless atnmosphere of the royal households?
One of two things will occur I believe: she will either start the beginning of a new kind of royalty, the sort that survives in some of the European countries, or she will unconciously wreck it. There are forces in and around The Firm that will not like "the likes of her" to break into the extended family of the whole artificial set-up: flunkies who like to flunk to the aristocrats; the remains of "the debutants" who still linger on the outskirts of royal events like those girls in "Dracula" who wish to suck your blood - sexily; the Duke - enough said; his daughter, Princess Anne, who seems to be more of a robot rather than a human being. They'll probably all play the game for a while but they'll bide their time before they strike with upper-class venom. In the immortal words of Gerry Adams: "We haven't gone away".
Maybe.
Or maybe not. Maybe they won't be allowed to by the British public. Maybe it will be as Matthew D'Ancona puts it in the Sunday Telegraph: "So relaxed, loving and straightforward are Prince William and his bride-to-be that it is easy to forget that the monarchy is about to embark on the greatest experiment in social mobility in its modern history. But it is the Palace that is on trial, not the new princess: the public will not take kindly to the slightest whiff of snobbery."
I'm with them there even if I'm not with them on much else besides regarding royalty.