ALL UNHAPPY FAMILIES ARE DIFFERENT...
Or are they? On why Prince Harry has a point
“All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The opening lines of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina are widely quoted and often assumed to be the truth. But beyond the bleak, portentous, Russian delivery, I’d argue that there isn’t much truth in this assertion at all.
Based on my life experience, I’d say all unhappy families share many similarities, while happy families are all quite differently happy. Unhappy families tend to be nests of blame and accusation, simmering, unspoken resentments harboured since childhood, and bitter assumptions, never voiced for fear of the consequences. Because if they are voiced, there are always consequences - whether that’s a screaming row, punishment of another sort, or the simple yet deadly response of complete excommunication.
Most unhappy families don’t want change, they want to cling to their own, hard-won crag like bedraggled birds of prey
Very often, an unhappy family contains a Black Sheep - the member who is the recipient of all negativity, the ‘bad’ one, whose truths (or perceived truths) threaten to topple the careful edifice, and screw the familial eco-system. The back sheep must be cast out and denied, because if their words are heard and heeded, things have to change. Most unhappy families don’t want change, they want to cling to their own, hard-won crag like bedraggled birds of prey, with white-knuckled talons. Nobody has the courage or the energy to change anything.
All this, obviously, is bringing me to Prince Harry. (I notice his author credit on Spare is not ‘The Duke of Sussex’ or even ‘Harry Sussex’. It’s Prince Harry, like Prince Buster; as if he’s about to drop a banger on TikTok. The lack of formality is another little dig at his status-mad relations).
He is a scion of the world’s most famous family. It’s not the Kardashians, it’s the Windsors, and when a member of The WMFF speaks out, everyone wants to hear it. We may already know all their secrets, from the Queen’s thrifty Tupperware to Tampaxgate to Diana’s many dalliances, but the difference is, we’ve never heard it from them - only from Harry’s hated press, nosing about, feeding grim little snippets of their lives into the media machine, to emerge as pulsating clickbait.
After decades of online headlines and seething newspaper reaction to everything they say or do, however bland or dull, there’s almost no seam left to mine. No wonder the conditions are prime for us to finally hear it from the horse-lover’s mouth - and it was always going to be Harry’s.
Dull, dutiful Willy was never going to crack the golden egg, and nor was melancholy, peevish Charles, with his love of Shakespeare, organic gardening and Goon jokes. Diana might have done, but the Firm always contained that risk in the form of her children - one of whom was the heir to their throne. Naturally, it fell to the overlooked, furious, traumatised Spare to see it, say it and fail to sort it.
Many observers have suggested that the Royal Family is a soap opera “like Eastenders.” It’s absolutely nothing like Eastenders, it’s like a Pinter play, filled with simmering silences, ill-advised affairs and unspoken rage. The key word that runs through the entire family like Blackpool rock is ‘unspoken.’
Whatever you may suffer, however painful, you simply go and tell a horse or a dog, then pull yourself together. Ill health, bereavement, bullying, shock, despair, failure, shame, depression, anxiety… up you get, nobody likes a moaner. No wonder they were all so keen on after-dinner parlour games with guests; they couldn’t risk a conversation where somebody might reveal a feeling. (“Carruthers, could you come quickly with the dustpan, somebody’s had an emotion. Awfully unpleasant.”)
Being the one to speak - even when, inevitably, it’s your subjective ‘truth’ - ie, your own perception of what happened to you, coloured by your own thoughts and emotions - is being the one to risk everything. In an ordinary family, the danger is rejection. In the Royal family, the further danger is that Harry will bring the whole crumbling old shopfront down with him.
Apart from the obvious mistakes - breaking the news to a 12 year old that his mum was dead with a brief hand on the knee, then leaving him in shock, dry-eyed and alone till morning, say, or always making it perfectly clear that he was ‘the spare’, emotionally as well as constitutionally - the biggest error the Royals made with Harry was in ignoring more red flags than sprouted in Diana’s famous minefield.
From the moment his world crashed, in a chilly Balmoral bedroom, Harry was angry, inarticulate, unheard, and disregarded. As a teenager, his every stupid move was on the front pages. In his Twenties, every woman he vaguely fancied was hounded by journalists before they’d even decided if they fancied him in return. When he found a role he loved in the army, it was brought to a premature end by the Australian press revealing his whereabouts - and there could be no more army for a security risk like Harry.
While William had the cosseting protection of Heirdom, Harry was dismissed as The Idiot, The Dimwit, The Thicko and his shames and failures were publicly enjoyed. He was the family’s capering clown, a nice bit of entertainment to offset the serious business of monarchy.
But despite his extreme privilege, he never asked for that role. It was given to him, and he was simply required to make himself fit its parameters - so, to keep his family happy, he did. Until, of course, he met Meghan.
Whatever your personal views on “the Suits actress” as the press still insist on calling her, she showed him something different. It may well have been merely a window into ‘Californian psychobabble’ but clearly, she reminded him of his mother, and equally clearly, he craved what she was offering.
What the fallout of Harry’s revelations will be, it’s too soon to tell. He may be dismissed as a spoilt cry-baby, an adult trapped in childhood, an ungrateful, whingeing brat who has never simply never accepted the neat quid pro quo that exists between the Royals and the press.
But he may also be the one who has tugged on the frayed threads of royalty, in a bid finally to make himself matter and save his sanity - and if it does begin to unravel, and bring an end to so much inhuman pomp and human misery, perhaps that’s not so bad. Chin up, old thing.
LOCHED UP: My life in the Scottish Highlands
I’ve lived in rural Argyll for seven years. January never gets easier.
Every year, I say, “Right, that’s it. I’m not spending January in our cottage again.” Every year, I spend January in our cottage again, because I don’t have enough money to go somewhere warm. I forget, the way you forget what a hangover’s like until you wake up and it cracks through your skull like a broken, sulphuric egg. I ignore the knowledge of what post-Christmas really means, because I’m all a-twinkle with snowy branches and gifts and mulled wine. Then it all vanishes, and we’re left adrift in the grimmest month of the year.
It’s like I am Legend, but with soup
January in the city is grim too, I know, but at least there are cinemas and restaurants doing half price deals. I just tried to book Sunday lunch within a twenty-mile radius, and every single restaurant, cafe, bar and bothy with a kettle is shut till February or March. They shut because there are no customers, but obviously, there are no customers because they’re shut. It’s like I am Legend, but with soup.
The weather is utterly foul - when they say ‘battered by storms’ in most of Britain, they mean ‘a roof tile might blow off,’ or ‘watch out for that wheelie bin!’ Here. it means there’s almost certainly a tree blocking the only road to the nearest town 15 miles away for three days, and you won’t sleep because it sounds as if Thor is doing everything in his power to uproot the cottage and chuck into the nearby loch. When it’s not stormy, the air is just pure rain- you’re breathing in rain, everything you touch is covered in condensation, and if you let the dogs out, they come back two minutes later like leather footballs, soaked and heavy with wet.
Sometimes, it’s just grey - a range of dim monotones, muffling and hopeless, like the Land of the Dead in the BBC adaptation of His Dark Materials. It gets borderline light at about 10am and starts getting dark again at 2pm, when a weak moon appears and I think about drawing the curtains.
I’m on a diet, too (though I just ate a Lindt teddy bear that my Mum put in my Advent calendar. You can’t reject the last vestige of Christmas at times like this.) I’ve cleared the kitchen of anything even slightly nice, and the fridge is groaning with healthiness. If I wanted to live on hake fillets and celery for the rest of my life, I’d be fine.
It’s all a bit depressing. On the upside, I took the small dog for a walk today and we saw a rainbow over the loch. And I’m on snowdrop-watch. The first shoots are always a cheerful thing. In a couple of months, the lambs will start appearing like corn popping, all over the fields, arriving overnight. And the sun will rise again. Or so I like to tell myself - even thought I suspect there may be many more chocolate teddies eaten before that glorious day.
RECIPE OF THE FORTNIGHT: Harissa carrot salad
I wonder if an online recipe is really a recipe without all the down-homey Mid-Western Mom introductory paragraphs about where they went to elementary school and what their Gramps did for a living. I mean, I can try.
“Hi Guys! I’m so super-excited to share this amazing recipe with you all today. I first heard about carrots when I was in kindergarten. Mrs Weiner was my teacher and she taught us all about these weird little orange guys, and who knew that one day I’d be smothering them in Harissa (a kind of Middle Eastern spicy sauce, available in aisle ten of Walmart, so drop one in your cart) and mixing them with three sticks of butter, two packs of shredded graham crackers and a whole bunch of maple syrup topped with a really great, super-size pack of shredded cheese and broiled. I’m so excited for my husband, Carter, to try this, he loves his butter sticks, and…”
No, look, I can’t do it. There are no butter sticks or maple syrup in this recipe. There’s not even anything very unhealthy. It’s a salad I made up, in the first flush of my excitable first-week-of-January diet, but it turned out to be amazing.
I’ll leave the quantities up to you, but one little gem lettuce is easily enough for two.
Ingredients
Little gem lettuce (washed and torn into pieces)
two or three big carrots
2 tbsps harissa
1 tbsp olive oil
a handful of chopped parsley
a handful of pecans
about 50-70g of Wensleydale (or for a stronger hit, feta) cubed/crumbled
half a thinly sliced red onion
a tomato, sliced
a couple of tablespoons of lime juice
a chunk of cucumber, peeled and cubed
a cooked beetroot, peeled and cubed
pepper
For the dressing
Plain yoghurt, mixed with a spoon of Tahini and a squeeze of lemon juice.
Method
Slice the onion and fan out in a bowl with the lime juice - this makes it much milder and less likely to cause indigestion later.
Add the lettuce, tomato, cucumber and beetroot to a bowl.
Cut the carrots into batons, and shake them in a sealed bag with the harissa, onions and parsley.
Lay them on baking paper* on a baking tray and roast at 180°C for 30 mins, or until they’re soft and starting to blacken.
Let them cool slightly, then add them to the salad.
Toast the pecans in a dry frying pan - this won’t take long, so just keep an eye on them till they crisp up a little. If you smell burning, it’s too late. (A metaphor for life.) Add to the salad.
Drain the onion and mix it through.
Add the cheese, mix it up, and drizzle over the dressing, with some black pepper.
Eat it all, even if you made it for two. Without butter sticks. What even is a stick, of butter, anyway.
Love how you write, a nice level of enquiry and honesty without resorting to that American Recipe
vernacular (that I just can't stand..{think Lena Lamont's voice in 'Singin' In The Rain')
(Which I watched twice at Christmas because I adore seeing all that beauty, talent and charisma on screen )
But I digress.
Thanks for also doing something really well.
So good on Harry and that bonkers institution.