ALEXANDRA SHULMAN'S NOTEBOOK: Kate has been so open about her diagnosis. Now let's leave her to get better in private
News of the Princess of Wales’s cancer diagnosis reached me as I was standing in a Copenhagen hotel lobby with a couple of friends before heading off for cocktails. Suddenly the decision of whether it would be a negroni or martini didn’t seem so pressing.
We were grounded by the news, watching the fragile-looking but immaculate and beautiful Princess on our smartphones. It’s an irony that at this challenging point in her life, a woman we rarely hear speak for long, so clearly and movingly, addressed the viewers in a truly majestic way. While she appeared magnificently composed we were tearful and thoroughly shaken.
Cancer is part of so many people’s lives. As a contemporary said the other day: ‘I just know so many people who are ill.’ And most of them have cancer.
Even so there was something particularly distressing about this woman, a mother of three young children and apparently so full of health and energy, struck by this ghastly disease.
It’s an irony that at this challenging point in her life, Princess Kate – a woman we rarely hear speak for long, so clearly and movingly, addressed the viewers in a truly majestic way
ALEXANDRA SHULMAN: Cancer is part of so many people’s lives. As a contemporary said the other day: ‘I just know so many people who are ill.’ And most of them have cancer
In some entirely irrational way cancer seemed to be for other people, not for one of the vital pillars of our hopes for the monarchy. But cancer has an insidious ability to sneak into our vision of the future, which makes it all the more difficult for the patient.
Not only are they having to endure the often unpleasant treatments involved in a cure, but they know that everyone around them is terrified of what might be ahead.
In her video, Catherine, while no doubt enduring some of the most difficult days of her life was trying to reassure the world, not only able to concentrate on keeping her children’s spirits up. The unpredictable nature of cancer makes it no easy task to sound so convincing of better days ahead.
But she is right. Fortunately cancer treatment is improving by the day and it will not be luck but science that will see our Princess eventually back on her feet after some months when she must be allowed to retire from our questions.
In the meantime this is the last thing I am going to write about her illness. She’s done her bit by coming out into the open when clearly she would rather have been able to keep things private. Now we have to do ours and leave her and her family in a nurturing bubble to get better.
Why whine about a claret-filled club?
Really, in this day and age, it’s too ridiculous that there is still such a fuss being made about the male-only membership policy of The Garrick Club.
Last week, both Cabinet Secretary Simon Case and MI6 head Sir Richard Moore have felt it necessary to resign their membership, because they’re on a leaked long list of high-profile members.
Surely that reaction says much more about them than it does about male-only clubs.
Both men would have known that the controversy over the membership policy has been rumbling for years – I remember during the 1980s, my father gleefully voting to keep us, his daughters, out.
It’s a long and complicated selection process, so Case and Moore wouldn’t have been making a spur-of-the-moment decision to join. Just because they may choose to spend the odd evening with a load of blokes pontificating, or even snoozing in a leather armchair, doesn’t in any way impact on their ability or desire to bring greater gender equality to the Civil Service or MI6.
So why did they cave in and resign? The Garrick is a splendid place, with excellent wine and half-decent food. It’s in a nice spot in Covent Garden next to restaurants and theatres rather than the no-man’s-land of Pall Mall, where most of the old clubs are situated.
But even so, I feel less than nothing that I can’t be a member. The whole point of any membership club is surely that some people are included and others excluded.
I’m perfectly happy to go there as a guest from time to time, which happily means I don’t ever have to pay, and the occasions that I have been in these hallowed rooms haven’t convinced me that momentous corridor-of-power decisions are being made there, while women are excluded.
It’s more a load of claret-filled bombastic chat.
A 007 mystery that should never end
IF Aaron Taylor-Johnson is announced as the new James Bond, it will be sad news – not because he wouldn’t be an excellent choice, but because it will have put an end to the entertaining debate about who will be anointed.
As soon as Daniel Craig decided to call it a day after a seemingly sticky end in No Time To Die, the rumours started about who might take over the role – presumably as Bond’s ghost?
Every potential British actor has been said to be in the running, including Idris Elba, who would be the first black 007, and there has even been speculation the next Bond could be a woman.
A female Bond is only marginally odder than the notion that Cillian Murphy might be a contender. Although Cillian is a man of formidable acting powers and mesmerising good looks, he’s way too slight to play Bond. I rather fancy the more muscular James Norton.
Style that lingers long in the memory
Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy
A huge new book on Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s style has been published 25 years after she died in a plane piloted by her husband. It is full of photographs of her still frequently and admiringly referenced look; the minimal sleek shapes, the monochrome palette, the understated make-up.
Even last week Vogue.com wrote that you can get her polished image by pairing a knee-length black lace skirt with a white shirt.
Like so many fashion inspirations, her impact has been magnified because of her early death.
Had Bessette-Kennedy lived, she would now be 58, and though her brand of dressing is wearable at all ages, she would probably not currently be the ever-shimmering style template she remains in our memory.