Prince harry

Prince Harry’s endorsement of therapy will likely turn some of us off ever seeking it out. Insisting that therapy has changed him for the better, he is urging his family to partake so that they too can ‘speak his language’ of simultaneously loaded and empty terms – such as ‘authenticity’. ‘If I didn’t know myself, how could members of my family know the real me?’ he said. This non-sequitur subverts the conventional wisdom that sometimes others can know you better than you know yourself. Yet tiring as all the Prince’s interventions are, a peremptory dismissal of psychoanalytic practice would be a mistake. In fact, psychoanalysts would probably refuse to accept the Prince is speaking their language anyway.

I was interested to read that the next Joker film has the subtitle ‘Folie à Deux’ – a lovely phrase not used enough these days. When shrinks talk about folie à deux (also known as Lasègue-Falret Syndrome, after the 19th-century French psychiatrists who discovered it) they mean a ‘shared delusional disorder’ in which symptoms of an irrational belief are transmitted from one individual to another – including folie en famille or folie à plusieurs ('madness of several’), sometimes leading to violence and even murder.

Harry and Meghan have yet to publicly speak about last week’s episode of South Park, presumably because they don’t have the staff left to formulate a press release. But California sources claim that Meghan has spent the past few days 'upset and overwhelmed' about how she was portrayed. If you’ve read anything about Harry and Meghan over the past three years, you’d think the pair would be delighted with how South Park parodied them. The entire episode, titled 'The Worldwide Privacy Tour', gives them enough fodder to moan for a few more books… or Netflix documentaries… or Spotify podcasts. Meghan can cry about how she is a victim of misogyny and Harry can claim that this was all a narrative concocted by the big, bad press.

After Prince Harry’s first date with the future Duchess of Sussex, he repaired to a friend’s house off the King’s Road. ‘Out came the tequila,’ he recalls in his much-discussed autobiography, Spare. ‘Out came the weed. We drank and smoked and watched… Inside Out.’ Meghan, however, interrupted his stoned reverie by Facetiming him, and immediately asked: ‘Are you watching cartoons?’ Harry replied: ‘No. I mean, yeah. It’s… Inside Out.’ It was, he recalls, ‘good weed, dude’. The quality of the Disney film, he doesn’t mention – though his pointed double use of ellipses around its title suggests it perhaps has some significance in relation to this new girlfriend.

The revelation that Prince Willy allegedly broke Prince Harold’s necklace in a fight shows how unshockable we’ve become when it comes to Harry and Meghan drama. Because my main question after this particular episode isn’t about press standards or dysfunction in the royal family – it’s ‘why was he wearing a necklace?’. When I was a child, my mother would impress upon my brother, sister and me the importance of not being seen to do or wear anything that could be regarded as ‘naff’. Tattoos and earrings or necklaces (on men) were all deemed especially naff. As a result, between the three of us we have 12 tattoos at the last count. I also have an earring and a necklace.   Yet men’s necklaces are not as nouveau as my mother feared.

The anticipation surrounding the release of a certain memoir today obscures a bigger question about the changing face of our publishing industry. Why does every Tom, Dick and Prince Harry think they can write a book these days? Figures last week showed the number of independent bookshops in Britain reached a ten-year high in 2022, thanks to a reading frenzy fuelled by pandemic lockdowns, the mushrooming of book groups and, perhaps most of all, the incessant, unstoppable march of the celebrity (not to mention royal) author. It is good news that there are now more than 1,000 independent bookshops in Britain and Ireland, the culmination of six years of growth at a time when other retail sectors have taken a battering.