The epitome of Britishness, only a Royal princess – her
formal title, the Princess Royal, makes the point explicitly – is allowed to
say the most unBritish thing: it would be better to eat horsemeat. This for the
benefit of the horses themselves, Her Royal Highness went on to say.
You can’t be more British than that.
The argument: owners in Britain would take more interest in
their horses’ welfare if they knew they could find a market for their nags in
the knacker’s yard.
Addressing the World Horse Welfare conference on November
14th, Princess Anne was a lady in red: coat-dress buttoned up high (scrawny
neck?); hair coiffed high on top of her head, in the manner of Edwardian ladies
whose hair was never cut – except a lock for a locket when their men went off
to war.
Tight-lipped (not given to flashy smiles); but to make that same mouthful as Homer Simpson’s, the teeth behind her upper lip must be bowed
forward. When she raises her hands to gesticulate, her fingers are pale and
reddish purple, resembling raw chicken.
Yet describing Princess Anne as a kind of cartoon – even without
resorting to the cliché that she looks kinda horsey herself – obscures the
essential characteristic of her conference address: it was truly (a)live;
instead of being a secondary rendition of something-I-prepared-earlier.
Here was someone in public life with the courage to go to
the podium and talk through, think through a strongly counter-intuitive
argument; without reading from a prepared script or committing it to memory in
advance.
We could see she had keywords on cards, but these only prompted
the Princess to invent sentences containing those keywords, formulating her
speech as she went on; and as she went on she all but stopped using them,
anyway.
A tiny instance of what life might be like in today’s public
sphere, if we really had one. How peculiar that this illustrative miniature
should have come from – of all people – Royalty.
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