Note: Link has been fixed.
As he explains at the Hilarious Pessimist, an article in Le Figaro on Prince William’s recent CNN interview intrigued Dalrymple for reasons that may not be obvious:
What intrigued me about the article was the photograph that accompanied it. It showed Prince William sitting in the garden of Kensington Palace during the interview. He was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt (the People’s Prince, then) and by the side of his chair, on the ground, was a plastic bottle of mineral water.
Presumably he had to drink the water directly from the bottle, for there was not a glass in sight, let alone a silver salver. Now it seems to me that there is no point in being a prince if one has to drink mineral water straight out of a plastic bottle like any person from, say, Leytonstone or Walthamstow; at the very least water should be served to a prince by a uniformed flunkey pouring it into a crystal glass or a silver-gilt goblet. If royal princes are going to refresh themselves in the proletarian fashion that the photograph seems to indicate, we might as well move straight to a presidential republican system.
Well, it could have been worse, he could have had designer-bum-out… okay, I apologise… once may be quite funny but twice is probably too much.
Anyway “it seems, people are uneasy to be out of the reach of refreshment for longer than a few seconds at a time, just as some people feel uneasy in the silence caused by an absence of electronic apparatus.”
speaking of electronic apparatus http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkDaCWXIXCE
both to stay thin and to purify, I’d say.
Oh I should probably add that epileptics and… well, maybe people generally should avoid the link in my previous comment, it’s a song by the Manic Street Preachers which I confess, I rather like.