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"If you have a spare half-hour..." starts a DM in my inbox this morning. "Watch this series of posts about what's really happening to Kate." The message is accompanied by a link to an Instagram Story of woman's talking head bobbing in front of a by-now very familiar picture of the Wales family.
I do not have a spare half hour. Of course I pressed play.
What's really happening to Kate? It's been the only topic of conversation all week. The where and how and WTF of Catherine, Princess Of Wales.
Last night, I went to a work dinner with a lot of smart women and Kate had cancer. She was in a coma. She's dead, maybe. Her husband is a cheat. She's left him. Her father-in-law is conspiring against her. She's now AI-generated. She no longer has a womb. Or a stomach. She's had a facelift. That's why she couldn't look into the camera in that car in Windsor the other day. Well, that, and because she's so furious at William she can't stand to look at him.
It's redundant but necessary to state that nobody, including myself, has absolutely any idea about the veracity of any of these theories, although the idea Kate no longer exists can probably be discounted. What certainly seems a pretty safe bet by this point is that the princess is, indeed, very, very angry.
Watch: a look back on Kate Middleton's style. Post continues below.
Wouldn't you be? You're a mother of three with a job that involves you being married, providing children, making small talk and hoping the world notices the causes you're promoting while looking at what you're wearing.
You've been pretty much doing it for 20 years, while your mother was mocked and your sister was hounded and your appearance was picked apart and you were called humiliating names.
You did get to live in a palace but the pay-off was never being able to go anywhere or say anything.
You've been blamed for your husband falling out with his brother because you weren't nice enough to his wife.
You're probably that secret royal racist, everyone says so.
You're definitely too thin, even though you thought that's what the job demanded.
You don't work hard enough but also who looks after your children?
There is absolutely no chance that you could change any of this because the future of a deeply problematic institution decreed by God depends on your marriage surviving anything that happens within it. You're dealing with all that and then you ask, politely, for three months off to recover from a major operation. It's not great timing, because your father-in-law is off sick, too, but health issues wait for no charity lunches. And then, instead of the team who are paid handsomely to protect you actually, you know, protecting you, they completely stuff it up.
Next minute, you're stepping up to take the blame for a botched PR photo, the paps who've been straining at the constraints of their stalking feel liberated by renewed "public interest" and women at a dinner party in Australia are confidently predicting that you no longer exist.
Your literal insides are now the main topic of global conversation on every news channel and podcast and in every broadsheet column.
It's all I've been doing this week, I admit. I wrote about Kate. I spoke about Kate on four different podcasts. I have had an inestimable number of IRL conversations about Kate. I'm doing it again, now.
But this has absolutely nothing to do with Kate. She is but one woman, a world away, locked inside a very lovely house, probably with a sore tummy. A woman having her privacy invaded at a gross scale, and not being looked after by a family who has deep form in this regard. Just ask Prince Harry.
It's not her, it's us. We're dying to be distracted. The world is dark and winter is coming. We don't know what to do or if we can help or how to solve. Not women and children being starved in a war zone. Not the rise of the Far Right in Europe. Not the potential return of a sex-offender to the highest office in the most influential country in the world. Not the murdered women here at home, the relentless news of another taken from us by a stranger, by a husband, by an ex.
We're worried about money. Our hormones are whack. We haven't seen Oppenheimer. We're addicted to the scroll. Our kids are addicted to the scroll. It's definitely all our fault.
And so. Here's a manageable mystery. One woman's misery, sure, but part of a much greater plot in a show we've been watching our whole lives. Let's waste time we profess not to have obsessing about a woman who appears to have everything. Just like the story itself: Palace intrigue, a picture-perfect princess, a family tearing each other apart.
Have we got a spare half-hour to work out what's really happening to Kate? No.
But we've never been more up for it.
H x
(Just like C x)
Feature Image: Instagram/Getty/Canva.
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