So Prince William graduates and gets some initials after his name to match the ones at the front - must be nicer than some of the four letter words we like to throw at him and his family of leaches.
Back off Royalists - we're not going to go calling them terrorist bait again. Instead we'll turn to the much more sophisticated Philip Pullman who (not content with writing a trilogy better than Tolkien's that crushes the nonsense of Narnia while destroying organised religion at the same time) also finds time to worry about the poor Windsors and the wretched Monarchy:
"On humanitarian grounds alone we ought to shut it down: it is quite simply too cruel to people to treat them like that - to say to a young man like Prince William ''No matter what your talents, your interests or your inclinations, you shall never have a career, you shall never be allowed to make a reputation or contribute to society as an engineer or a scholar or an architect or anything else except a stuffed dummy that opens hospitals and makes speeches that are written for you by someone else. You shall waste the most vigorous years of your life in hanging around making meaningless conversation with people who are desperately nervous in case they make some minor mistake in etiquette. No-one will ever relate to you simply as one human being to another, no-one will ever contradict you, no-one will ever tell you the truth about yourself. You will be flattered, lied to, crawled to from morning till night; your attention will be fought over by servants and courtiers, who will reward your disapproval with fawning apology to your face and poisonous bitterness behind your back. If you can persuade some unfortunate woman to marry you, her life will be a misery. Nothing she does will escape the sordid attention of the press, and if she deviates in the slightest degree from conventional ideas of beauty, every photograph of her will be as unflattering as possible, and her appearance, her dress sense, her weight, her very features will be mercilessly scorned. If you utter your opinions in public, you will set half the country against you; if you utter no opinions at all, you will be scoffed at as empty-headed. And so on, till you die."
What a nice way of putting it. You can read the whole thing (which includes a comparison with the delightful Swedish Royal family and also mentions his "fondness for brightly coloured socks" over on his wonderful website.
Note: The image of Lyra and Pan is by The Brownlee Brothers
