Remotely interested...

😂 Jam on top Pete everybody knows that, it is the law nothing to debate! 😉

No comment 🤫

I hope you are right Rob in respect of Alpine Joe. I know his posts weren't everybody's cup of tea but I loved his contributions. Intelligent and articulate with serious points interspersed with tongue in cheek, and he has a fantastic ability to use words and structure which evoke graphic images.

I had a feeling AJ left because of our other recent leaver. Every time AJ put up an intelligent, relevant, and humourous post it would be immediately followed by some peurile drivel from our departed friend. It somewhat detracted from AJ's contributions.

So hopefully we will see AJ back before long.

As for the other one I am somewhat ambivalent. We proved to be an extremely tolerant forum.If banging out posts which were not really remotely interesting helped him stay out of prison or a perhaps more suitable establishment, then that is fine with me particularly since Jon announced the blocking mechanism whereby I haven't been able to read any of his posts recently. Strangely I never once felt that I had been deprived of anything.

Best wishes to him! As my mother used to say "There is nowt as strange as folk" 😉

After the dramas of TRUMP, BREXIT, COVID and ANTI-VAX, the World looks a bit quiet atm - let's just be thankful for that.

Moving on - the tragedy of Harry is very sad - I agreed with this DT article 100%

"The Sussexes have failed to learn from the mistakes, or the strengths, of the late princess - Did Meghan see a Diana-shaped hole in the monarchy and try to fill it?

There was a sense of déjà vu, don’t you think, about Harry and Meghan’s interview with Oprah Winfrey? At least for those of us who can remember Diana, Princess of Wales, baring her soul to Martin Bashir in 1995. For a man who says that he fears that history is repeating itself in respect of his mother and his wife, Prince Harry went out of his way to make the same mistakes as Diana. She regretted (though never repudiated) her Panorama interview, but here we are with Oprah, Harry and Meghan: the same again, only more so.

Indeed, Harry observed in the interview that his mother would be “angry and sad” that he felt he had to leave the Royal family, but he “felt her presence” and observed that “she saw it coming”. Actually, I’m not sure that she could have foreseen quite how completely her son would be dominated by an American wife who has, remarkably, tried to replicate the Diana story. That is to say: neglect by the Royal family, cruelty on the part of the Prince of Wales and cold shouldering by the Palace establishment. There was, in fact, something uncanny about the way in which Meghan presented herself in the same light as her husband’s mother, though Diana never quite got around to comparing herself with the Little Mermaid.

Actually, a useful preparation for the Oprah interview would have been a viewing of the brilliant documentary, Diana: In Her Own Words, on Netflix, in which the princess speaks of her experiences in a series of secret tape recordings made in 1991 to help the journalist Andrew Morton write her biography.

It makes you wonder: did Meghan see a Diana-shaped hole in the monarchy and try to fill it? Is that what Prince Harry wanted? His elder brother plainly recognised that he needed emotional stability – and Kate, with her solid middle-class family, provided it – but Harry sought out a woman as emotionally needy as his mother. Does he see himself as “saving” his wife because he was not able to protect his mother?

Harry does seem to replicate his mother in his impulsiveness – evident in the whole Megxit drama – and his willingness to act first and rationalise his actions later. At 36, he is now the same age as she was when she died. Like Diana, he has problems with Prince Charles (though it is a little rich for this extravagant pair to complain about him cutting off financial support). Like her, he has an easy, popular touch. Like her, he wants to be outside the Royal family but remain somehow royal, and to create his own idea of public service. It’s possible, in fact, that Prince Harry was already primed to replicate his mother’s divorce from the Royal family, but as he admitted to Oprah, it is unlikely to have happened without his wife.

For her part, Meghan is now creating herself in Diana’s image of the emotionally fragile outsider – except with an added race component – and selling her reverse fairy tale, in which she “rescues” her prince from his family, to the US audience at which the Oprah interview was squarely directed. Certainly, the couple want to be free of the constraints of royalty, but like Diana, they do not want to be ignored.

However – how to put this? – what came across from Diana’s account of herself (admittedly when she was at a low ebb), is that she was truthful in saying how badly, or insensitively, she was treated. Her aloneness prior to her wedding, her husband’s undemonstrativeness, brusqueness and infidelity, her steep learning curve in the position in which she found herself so soon after her 20th birthday, her self-harm and emotional fragility; all that rang true because it was true.

Much of her daughter-in-law’s account of her victim status to Oprah does not. We may feel sympathy for her assertion that she felt suicidal, but many of Meghan’s crises appear to have happened mostly inside her own head. What’s evident is that there was a curious clash of her expectations about royal life with the reality for which she seemed almost wilfully unprepared.

Granted, no one can possibly be prepared for the avalanche of publicity that greets a beautiful and photogenic woman marrying into the Royal family, and social media amplifies every criticism to a level unimaginable in Diana’s day, but it doesn’t quite wash that Meghan was not offered support had she been willing to take it, or that the Royal family had learnt nothing from the experience with Diana.

What was evident even on the outside, was that the Queen did her best to make her grandson’s wife welcome, as did other members of the family. Alas, no one appears to have pointed out to Meghan the difference between marrying the heir and marrying the spare. It was not Diana’s role she was inheriting, it was Fergie’s.

But the great difference between Diana and her son and his wife – apart from the obvious, that as an earl’s daughter, she talked the same language as the Royal family – is that Diana ultimately had the good of that family at heart. That remark about Charles and William being trapped inside the institution is that of a man who doesn’t really mind what damage he causes it.

What would Diana have made of her son’s wife? She may not have been academic but she was intelligent and shrewd, with an intuitive understanding of people. I fancy she would have taken the measure of Meghan at a hundred paces; certainly she would have recognised a ruthlessness and manipulativeness that escaped her son. In Diana, Meghan would have met her match.

There’s another parallel between Diana and Harry. After the Panorama interview, the nation was divided between Team Di and Team Charles – and I should say that on the grounds of his affair with Camilla, I found myself on Diana’s side. It was a cultural divide, between those like Nicholas Soames, a friend of Charles, who more or less thought Diana unhinged, and those on the princess’s side who saw her as an inspiring woman who had taken her life into her own hands, on her own terms.

Now it has happened again… the country split between those who think Harry and Meghan are narcissistic, self-regarding, extravagant and ungrateful, and those who feel that they are victims of racism and snobbery and deserve praise for their emotional literacy and frankness. As a friend observed, the couple are like a national Sorting Hat, dividing everyone by house and by temperament. There’s a strong generational element, and maybe a racial element, too. Inevitably the divide has a political component… liberal papers are inclined to take a lenient view of the couple. It’s not quite the national unity the Queen might have hoped for.

After Diana’s bombshell interview, things were never quite the same. And this will be true now. No family, no relationship, is improved by sharing grievances with several million others; after this, the distance between the Sussexes and Harry’s family may be greater than the physical space of the Atlantic Ocean. Prince Harry is his mother’s son all right, but has not learnt either from her mistakes or from her strengths."

Thanks for that swatcat so nice to see sensible and balanced commentary on the Remotely Interested thread.

The two main issues for me was the wisdom of the Royal household (or ex members) giving media interviews, and what came over as a major issue the alleged 'racism' about comments about the colour of the baby.

As far as media interviews are concerned surely there is enough evidence now that they should be avoided at all costs. Diana came over as incredibly naive, Andrew was cringeworthy and creepy, and Harry seemed to be unconvincingly trying to support his wife.

The only one that comes over well is The Queen on Christmas Day but I am normally drunk by then (and I expect she is as well as it is pre-recorded).

The allegation of racism was the most serious thing to come out of the interview but whether it was racist all depends on context and the couple whilst throwing in this hand grenade were unwilling to provide any detail.

My immediate thoughts were that it was not necessarily racist as I felt that having a discussion about the possible colour of the unborn baby would be a normal topic of discussion in a mixed race family. I remembered the days when I was producing babies (with quite alarming regularity) and as the sex was not known before birth in those days we discussed the two possible genders of the unborn baby (there were only two in those days!). The gender and how the baby may look are points of interest for the family, and I am sure the same sort of discussion takes place in families where one parent has black hair and the other has ginger hair.

Not being in a mixed race relationship myself I checked with two mixed race couples I know. Both families agreed and said that they had definitely discussed possible colour of the unborn baby and that it was a perfectly normal conversation. I also spoke to a black family who are friends and they did not see it as racist.

I appreciate that for statistical analysis purposes 3 families are not a sufficient sample, and there is also the danger that as friends they could have just said what they thought I wanted to hear, although knowing them all well I doubt that is the case as they are all intelligent and open to informed debate on any subject.

Context is the key. It could have been a racist remark, but to throw it into the interview and then not give any detail was of little use to anybody.....and Oprah must take most responsibility for that.

What an insipid and contrived interview. Did Oprah never see David Frost interview President Nixon? That's the way to do it! 😉

Strange you should say that as I thinking about Register earlier. I know you would find that unbelievable, but amazingly it is absolutely true.

Watching the Jeremy Vine show on Channel 5 there was a report of Lord Bethell speaking in the House of Lords saying that nurses are well paid and should not be given special treatment.

Now Lord Bethell has featured on this thread before as Register did a course with him in the Army. He didn't speak highly of him! 🤣

This post can be found on page 2 of this thread, for those who are remotely interested! 😉

Stewart, Stefano, P Pete - thanks for the thoughtful replies. I suspect the issues involved will be battled over for a long time. It's important IMHO - the 'woke' brigade versus the real World !

Extracted from the DT, this struck some chords . . . .

"Certain claims were instantly uncredible; such as the suggestion Archie was denied the title “Prince” because he was mixed-race, or that the Archbishop of Canterbury performed an official wedding ceremony in their garden, days before the global spectacle of their Windsor nuptials. Many of the headlines used to illustrate the couple’s ‘mistreatment’ by the UK media were at best, taken out of context – at worst, outrageously misappropriated. All told, the Sussexes’ ‘truth’ bears more than a passing resemblance to Trump’s ‘alternative facts’.

Very little of this seems to matter, however, in a world where ‘lived experience’ can, and often does, supersede objective reality. Questioning individuals may expect to be accused of racism, downplaying mental health, or both. “Believe her, no matter what”, seems to be the demand – even when it doesn’t make sense. “I wasn’t interested in grandeur”, cries the woman in the $4500 dress. Like Alice through the looking glass, we are required to believe impossible things before breakfast. We must trust that an intelligent modern woman neglected to perform even a cursory google of her future husband – a prince no less – before their first date. We must lionise a couple who insist they are being kind and respectful, even as they carelessly cast suspicion around their relatives and compound the Queen’s anxieties at a traumatic time. We are expected to agree that people who are richer than Croesus, wielding vast cultural influence, are unambiguous victims."

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/11/living-meghans-truth-now/