As literally nobody will allow you to forget, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are back in the UK. And if you wondered (you didn’t) about how Meghan would be spending her time here (you didn’t), now we know.
Markle recently uploaded a short Instagram reel showing us how her new life is unfolding. She walks in the woods. She sits by a roaring log fire. Her children jump in puddles and go fishing on ornamental lakes and ride their bicycles as herds of deer cross their path. It is, by all accounts, a million miles from Montecito.
open image in galleryThat said, it also seems to be a million miles away from any version of the UK that most regular British people might be familiar with. Unless you urgently need to dry yourself off after some sort of public urinary accident, an open fire in an unseasonably warm September is an absolute madness. Fishing on an empty lake with a bridge that ornamental isn’t something a lot of us do, either. The whole thing is extremely bizarre.
Look, this can’t be easy for Meghan Markle. Returning to a country that you left in a flounce cannot be easy. It takes guts to come back to a place where you’re constantly reminded how statistically unpopular you are. As a nation, we should recognise that. However, it would help her cause enormously if she moved away from this catalogue fairytale version of Britain and started to post more relatably about the UK. With that in mind, I have some suggestions for upcoming reels that would get her back into everyone’s good books in double time.
open image in galleryWe’ll start by easing her gently. It’s clear that Meghan’s social media strategy involves lots of (anonymous) footage of her children enjoying the country. But few of us will be able to relate to idyllic deer park bicycle rides. A much more realistic picture of modern British parenting might come, for instance, if she filmed herself applying a verruca pen to their feet because the municipal council pool where they have swimming lessons has trouble retaining cleaning staff.
We want to see her in a Farmfoods with a 24-can multipack of R Whites lemonade under one arm and a whole frozen turkey under the other
And she should really have a realistic reel of the British high street. Nobody wants to see bougie little independent traders who sell baskets of edible flower petals for the price of a small used car, as much as it would fit her brand. We demand to see Meghan Markle being forced to navigate the liminal, low-ceilinged Backrooms-style experience of a pre-administration TG Jones. We want to see her right at the back of the shop, where all the GCSE revision handbooks are, where there’s no natural light and one of the overhead lamps keeps giving out. And then, after that, we want to see her in a Farmfoods with a 24-can multipack of R Whites lemonade under one arm and a whole frozen turkey under the other. Then she’d be more like us.
Similarly, if Harry really wants to go fishing, then make him do it on a beach. Make it drizzling and too windy, and have him constantly worried that he’s going to hook a dog through the eye when he casts. And then, when he catches something, let him push a cosh into Archie’s hand and tell him to kill it. Make it really urgent, and reinforce the idea that the fish will only suffer more if he doesn’t decisively smash it on the head hard enough to render it dead, even though this will unsettle Archie so profoundly that he will never be the same again. This is something all British children go through, and not just me and I’m definitely not just projecting or anything.
open image in galleryAnd then, of course, there are the basic facts of British life that really deserve Markle’s amplification. Wetherspoons has its curry club on Thursday. The only Greggs seasonal bake worth putting your faith in is the katsu one. The supermarket meal deal has three main rules (don’t get crisps, don’t get a sandwich you could make at home, don’t go premium because nobody likes a show-off), and seeing how strictly someone sticks to them will tell you more about their personality than knowing them for a decade. Shopping at a Tesco Express without a Clubcard these days is essentially the equivalent of being mugged at gunpoint.
Do you see the difference this would make? Harry and Meghan are private citizens now, and they deserve to make content that reflects this. As romantic as a leafy dog walk might be to her American fans, British people want to see Meghan try to defrost a packet of sausages with a hairdryer because she forgot to get anything ready for tea.
Do this next, and we’ll love her forever.