Lying in bed with a swollen face, I decided that the best thing to do was nothing, so I ended up watching the Duchess of Sussex make smoothies.
I don’t know why everyone is so mean about her Netflix show because it hit the spot for me. As I took to my bed after surgery to take out the old screws and plates in my long-ago broken jaw, everything put me on edge apart from watching Meghan and her lovely way of smiling and smiling as she expressed wonderment at a bunch of grapes, or the way a liquidiser whirred.
By day three of lying in bed watching With Love, Meghan, I had contracted cabin fever, or Stockholm syndrome
As my face swelled and turned some interesting shades of green and yellow, and I wondered if I would ever smile again, there was something absolutely restorative about watching Meghan gasp with enthusiasm about flowers and honey and lettuce. Everything was ‘Amazing!’ and ‘Wonderful!’
Maybe it is, I thought, as the first sun of spring began to shine through the windows, and the builder boyfriend thrashed about in the woodland garden below, on another of his clearing projects.
He traipsed up the stairs dutifully twice a day with bowls of soup for lunch and plates of cottage pie for dinner, bless him.
But, I was thinking, as soon as I’m up and about, I should try to make this Lebanese salad the smiling duchess is making in her perfect pretend kitchen. (Is this what general anaesthetic does to you?)
By day three of lying in bed watching With Love, Meghan while taking strong painkillers, I had contracted cabin fever, or Stockholm syndrome, or something, for I came to the conclusion that she is a woman much misunderstood.
It was clear she had hidden depths full of wonderful qualities. For example, if you haven’t seen it, as she awaits the arrival to her pretend kitchen of a vegan ‘friend’ who is to come and make a plant-based curry, she labours considerably in the making of vegan macaroons, which she painstakingly creates from almost nothing, as one must do with vegan cooking, using the juice from a tin of chickpeas, if you please, to make the froth to create some kind of chewy meringuey wodge.
I’m using ‘friend’ in inverted commas because it’s not entirely clear if she’s met these ‘friends’ all that much before. They’re guests who are meant to perform in some way. She has met this plant-based friend, and her husband who also comes, once before at a dinner party.
After cooking the curry, the ‘friend’ says that she’s going to make Meghan some of her special masala chai tea and Meghan is delighted. My heart was in my aching mouth as the ‘friend’ boiled up some spices in a pan and Meghan suggested that they could add either oat milk or coconut milk, and the friend said, flatly: ‘I like oat milk.’ And there was a terrible moment as tumbleweed threatens to engulf the pretend kitchen.
Poor Meghan looks devastated, before seamlessly pulling herself together and handing her ‘friend’ a beautiful old-fashioned glass bottle of her best organic oat milk. She looks heartbroken, but she styles it out. I’d have screamed ‘CUT!’ and thrown the woman off my set, wouldn’t you? Meghan may get some stick but she’s nicer than me by a long chalk.
All her guest stars are no one I’ve heard of. Compared with Meghan, they’re not famous. Most are English so imagine how unknown they are in America. But Meghan smiles, works with what she has, and somehow gets ‘friends’ to agree to make soap with her, or some pressed-flower jewellery.
Whatever she does, she lets slip mid-way through that she’s never done it before. When she makes green smoothies in a liquidiser she squeals with surprise as she presses the buttons.
The only thing she says she has done before is roast a chicken. And as she shows us how to do this, she talks to the chicken while putting it in a pot, and calls it ‘lady’ and ‘girl’, like it’s still with us.
Everything pleases her. It’s deeply soothing. It’s absolutely the thing to watch if your face happens to be swollen, which must be some kind of market, surely.
I don’t know why Netflix won’t run any more of it, with the recovering-from-surgery community in mind, particularly as it is possible that the outtakes might be hilarious, although that would have hurt my face.
It’s possible she’s been yelling ‘CUT!’ and telling her guests to try harder to make her look better. ‘What the hell? Oat or coconut? Answer, yes. Seriously?’ I would.
But we cannot know this, nor enjoy witnessing it if it happened, which I don’t think it did, because she comes off as having lovely manners. But if she did lose it, Netflix cut it out. They’ve no vision.
Someone else who has no vision is Airbnb. I couldn’t lie in bed taking bookings on my phone because they cut me off.
The whizz kids they employ have made their app ‘better’, which means it is now not supported by the type of iPhone I have and I need to buy a new one.
I rang them and the nice Indian call centre chap told me that I don’t have to buy an iPhone – and he listed all the other phones I could buy. ‘I don’t want to buy any phone!’ I ranted. ‘I have a phone that is a perfectly good phone and you’ve no right to tell me I can’t use it any more!’
It’s a racket. You download these apps and they tell you a year later that the app has been made ‘better’ so you must download the update and if you can’t download the update, buy a new phone. Just go and spend 600 quid. It makes me so mad.
Netflix did this to my iPad and I couldn’t watch movies on it any more. They’ll be telling me next that I have to download the update on my phone or I can’t watch Meghan in bed…
What would Meghan do? She would smile, and buy a new phone, and say: ‘Oh! This new phone is wonderful!’ Maybe I’ll just do that.
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