A Prince Writes
by our royalty correspondent, Harry Prince (not his real name)
Considerable public concern has been expressed about some of my recent endeavours. When one is in the public eye, one must accept a certain amount of criticism of one's actions. One would hope, however, for some attempt to be made to understand why one has behaved in what may at first seem to be an unaccountable way.
Specifically, one might take note of the obvious fact that life at Eton has notable longueurs. For recreational alternatives we have a choice between the grand old public school traditions of same-sex intimacy with one's schoolmates and same-sex intimacy with the masters. It should be obvious to the meanest intelligence that in that light even drunkenness and bar fighting acquire a certain glamour.
Pater's famous and widely approved discussion with me had its longueurs as well. He asked me to consider the consequences of behaviour such as mine to someone in my position. I did consider them, and found them, without passing my opinion on to Pater, to be considerably less harmful than the consequences of publicly maintaining a mistress when one is Prince of W____, although I readily admit that in evaluating the relative harmfulness of these matters I do not have the benefit of that more mature, sophisticated perspective which Pater has acquired over the course of an adulthood devoted to activities such as public adultery and talking to plants.
One is probably right to castigate me for calling the landlord of the Rattlebone Inn a fucking frog. In retrospect I believe a fairer term would have been fucking snail-eating garlic-exhaling German-loving British-agriculture-sabotaging fucking frog.
The aspect of my recent behaviour which I most regret is being an habitué of an establishment with the irretrievably naff name of Rattlebone Inn. Scarcely the behaviour one expects of a prince of the blood royal, what? I have behaved as if I were no better than some self-regarding quantity surveyor looking for a bit of quality on his night out.
But I have learnt my lesson. If I am to avoid losing another two hours of my life which I will never get back being escorted round a rehabilitation clinic while being continually reminded of the supposedly high probability that I will end up sleeping under a bridge (have they never heard of Nana?), I must remember to pay that fucking frog off next time.
A Prince Writes © Coolth, 2001
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