In return, there is a small request. Could you both give a ring when convenient please, because something extraordinary has just struck me. After a lifetime spent as a loyal-ish subject of your sister/daughter and watching the family on telly doing whatever, one knows exactly what you look like but has no idea what you sound like. And a quick survey in the pub suggests one is not alone.
This is the reverse of the situation in the middle class's other favourite long-running soap. In The Archers, the voice of, say, Eddie Grundy is instantly recognisable but not his face. In The Royals it's the other way about. Does Princess Margaret, as one would like to imagine, have a lived-in, husky voice, combining Fenella Fielding, Edith Piaf and a soupcon of Hyacinth Bucket? Maybe you've met her, or remember her on Desert Island Discs (1981) or saying "Goodnight" on Children's Hour (1940). Otherwise, who could know?
I did hear the Queen Mother at the pageant for her 100th birthday. She spoke for about 10 seconds, which slightly dented the theory that she has a Gracie Fields-style Lankysheer accent. But for normal conversation the Queen keeps an entirely different voice from the familiar husband-and-I drone. So the file on her mother is still open. Even the BBC archive apparently has very little.
The Queen Mother is, of course, the link with a distant royal past. She was already alive on January 22 1901, a century ago next Monday, when Queen Victoria died. Instinctively, you think that royalty must since then have become infinitely more accessible and closer to the public. Maybe not.
Though Victoria's voice remains a mystery for obvious reasons, her innermost thoughts are available. In 1868 she published Leaves from the Journal from Our Life in the Highlands, followed 16 years later by More Leaves. We think of her as an infinitely remote and forbidding figure, but in the context of the time publishing her diary was the equivalent of submitting to interview by Anthony Clare.
There are no major indiscretions of state ("Gladstone came round. What a slimy fat puffball!"). And Victoria was no Alan Clark in the matter of style either. Most of her material is descriptive, but unfortunately her powers of description are rather lim ited. The road to Blair Atholl is "beautiful"; the morning they sailed to Arran was "beautiful"; so were the Kingussie road, the Falls of Garbhalt, Alt-Na-Giuthasach, and even the Rev McLeod's sermon.
Occasionally, things are "provoking". Indeed, by 1866 something very provoking had happened - her beloved husband, Prince Albert, was dead. And what made her journals something other than laughable was the transparency of her emotions. In the first volume it was not just the scenery that was beautiful. Life was too. Albert strides through the book in his tweeds, killing a stag every few pages, informing Victoria at every turn in the road that a particular sight was just like Germany, Switzerland or Italy, and she repeating his every banality as though it were a piercing insight.
The second volume is far more sombre. Her grief, bordering on obsession, suffuses every page, even the ones dominated by her servant (and alleged lover) John Brown. In both she comes across as very human and rather endearing. There was a wonderful moment when she and Albert were incognito and stopped at the inn at Dalwhinnie: "There was hardly anything to eat .. only tea and two miserable starved Highland chickens. No potatoes! No pudding and no fun ."
Her family were horrified by the whole business: the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, called the Journals "twaddle" and complained that he was never mentioned. The Queen replied that he was mentioned five times and it would have been more if he visited his mamma more often. The Duke of Cambridge said publication was "an act of insanity".
Well, they were huge best-sellers (the royalties went to charity, not royalty) and there is some evidence that the public response did much to counter incipient republicanism in the years when the Queen was shut away in mourning. Much of the criticism was pure snobbery: the family were furious that she wrote about Brown as if he were some sort of equal.
We thus have more insight into the heart and mind of the Queen who is a hundred years dead than the one who is a hundred years alive. This may explain something of the royal family's current troubles.
