Louisa Simmonds

Wills and Kate (Photo credit: Scorpions and Centaurs)

Some people just can’t take ‘no’ for an answer.

I thought that when I migrated to the other side of the world I would escape my national debt to Royalty.

But now they’ve turned up on my doorstep in Sydney.

Kurt was very excited when he saw the police turn up in our street yesterday. He thought that someone had died. But it turned out that Kate and Will were ‘just passing’ and then they swished past me again today in their cavalcade while I was out walking quickly jogging. One of the other locals asked me if I’d waved ‘hi’ to Will and Kate.

‘No’, I said, ‘they’re family.’

I used to be a Royalist when I was growing up. In those days, you had to be when you lived in London, otherwise they locked you up in the Tower and threw away the key.

My first schoolgirl crush wasn’t Simon Le Bon from Duran Duran – it was Prince Charles. I’ve always had peculiar taste in men. I even wrote to him once to tell him how much I admired him and Buckingham Palace wrote back to acknowledge my letter and to remind me that the Prince didn’t have time to respond to every member of the riff raff due to the demands of his busy schedule.

Duran Duran: Simon Le Bon Gets Crowd Involved (Photo credit: pj_in_oz)

Then he met Diana and I felt slighted. She was more beautiful that I was and she was ‘connected’. I think I finally realized then that I would never be his Princess.

Nevertheless, I still went to the Royal Wedding with my own family. I stood on the streets of the Mall from 5.30am with the rest of the British population, waving my flags and waiting for my precious glimpse of ‘the one that got away’. The Royal couple was symbolic of the fairy tale that we were girls were brought up to aspire to, then.

Thank Fuck for feminism that things changed.

I found my own frog prince, eventually. Not a prince exactly, but a partner. He’s not the stereotypical one that I thought I’d fall for back when I still had princess aspirations but he’s grown on me over the years.

Union Jack (Photo credit: .craig)

There were so many times in my young life that I stood in front of Royal houses and palaces and had British history rammed down my throat and although the strength of my feelings for Royalty has diminished with age, I still remember the emotions linked to patriotism and pride at being part of that club. The union jack can still make my heart swell.

Royalty drove past my palace today. Funny how things can come full circle over the course of a life.

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