I am ten thousand years late to the Kate Middleton story. People would ask me about Kate Middleton and I’d say something like, I hear William finally popped the question! This is the level of behind-on-the-news I am, where royals are concerned.
I mean occasionally I will see a photo in which royal children appear, and they are at this point elderly, so presumably William and Kate have heirs. These people are my rulers now, I think; the Canadian citizenship ceremony involves promising allegiance towards King Charles, this I did, and there’s a line about how by extension you also do the same to his heirs and successors. Well. I want to do this. I am awaiting the proverbial royal visit to my office aka my couch. But who are they, if one of them isn’t anywhere to be seen?
It seems wrong to care about a royal’s personal business. More wrong still than being nosy about a stranger, or a different sort of celebrity. Royals are famous without asking for this. And they get nothing (apart from gobs of money and glamor and) in return. A married-in royal arguably did sign up for some of this, but then consider that Princess Diana’s the one who was (maybe?) killed by paparazzi, or at least she was the royal whose short life made it not just cringe and lowbrow to care about royals’ behind-closed-doors goings-on but borderline unethical.
I mean people do care, thus all the Queen-themed fictionalized content. But how wrong to do so.
Anyway I have gone from knowing that Kate Middleton had an unnamed abdominal ailment surgically addressed and thinking that I’m a terrible person for even fleetingly, privately, wondering what it could be, to suddenly wondering, panicked, where is Kate Middleton?
Yes, this is about the photo thing.
I am a naive product of an era before deepfakes. I saw the photo, thought it was maybe significant she was seated, figured whichever face-blurring is done to women over 30 had probably happened (chez the photographer or elsewhere), but assumed this was a photo of what it looked to be, the children serving as a today’s-date newspaper, anchoring this in time. I saw that there were truthers and thought, OK, some people have time on their eight-fingered hands, happy for that for them.
But wait a second. If this is a photoshop malfunction, couldn’t they just release the photo or a photo it was based on, some original photo, and then there’s no mystery?
The mystery, to be clear, isn’t what exactly is happening with her medical condition. It’s… is she around? Living? Doing whatever the royal version of work-from-home is until she’s able to make in-person appearances again?
Because if you’re a pleb, you do have to surface from time to time, in some capacity, to retain your role. Even tenured professors have to teach. But what is a royal? (A genuine question rooted in my ignorance.) Is it like being a relative supported by family, whose inability to work is sad but ultimately only a concern for those providing support, and if they are infini-rich, it’s not a (financial) problem? Or is it a public-facing job, from which an absence requires explanation or accountability and accountability to whom?
I think what I’m asking here, maybe, is if the decorous and sensible thing of respect their privacy at this time is both fair and slightly unfair, and it’s the second part that on some level encourages the more wild speculation that does occur, once people free themselves from the confines of decorum. Was Kate Middleton abducted by space aliens?
When the reality is probably something like, she’s unwell, and if she were a normal person would either be back at work and miserable or if on disability (which I know, from Benidorm, to be generous in the UK, unless Benidorm wasn’t a documentary), unable to be on top-secret disability wherein no one knew what had happened. But she is not a normal person, so she is able to recover (?) in sealed-up private. And she sort of has no other option, given that ‘work’ in her case is more or less limited to appearing in public while looking robust.
There are all sorts of things that could be wrong with someone’s health that would make ruddy public appearances impossible, but because this is a woman who appeared in heels and with a 2-inch waist five minutes after giving birth, superhuman feats are expected, so in their absence, the UFO starts to seem the only logical possibility.
Hopefully she is fine. Possibly she is seriously ill. Possibly alien abduction. But you left out the very important possibility that she returns and we all think she's fine but it's really a shape shifter or Westworld style replicant.
And if she is, how many others might be also?
Just saying.
😎
I still can’t get over the cack-handedness of their press office. The internet has been awash with increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories for weeks while she’s out of sight recovering from some sort of surgical procedure, so let’s release an obviously doctored photo for Mother’s Day! That will obviously calm things down.