Like four out of five fathers these days, Prince Harry was at the bedside when Meghan gave birth to Archie .
His ecstatic remarks to camera captured the joy of bringing a child into the world.
“The most amazing experience ever imagined,” he gushed.
This is very modern stuff, in line with the contemporary image the royals are keen to promote.
“Being there for baby” has become absurdly fashionable. Dads insist on being at the midwife’s elbow through the whole gory process of childbirth.
“Bonding with baby” they call it.
Meghan Markle and Prince Harry's son Archie WILL become a Prince, claims senior source
But men often get in the way. In his brilliant best-seller This Is Going To Hurt, former obstetrician Adam Kay relates how one father insisted on being first to touch the baby - even though it was a caesarean section.
Another was “dicking around on a birthing ball and fell off, cracking his skull on the ground”. And one fool kept cracking jokes, culminating in “ever had a baby come out a different colour to the parents?”
“Does blue count?” he replied. Ouch! That shut him up.
With our first, I was only allowed to look at her through a glass screen. Men weren’t allowed anywhere near the labour ward.
Next time, I was there for Josephine, but only because she arrived prematurely – in the kitchen, on the spare bed from which I’d just evicted the lodger.
Meghan Markle and Harry post adorable photo of Duke holding babygrow for Archie on Instagam
I nearly missed the show, discussing my books with the university GP. As instructed by the doc I burned the afterbirth, wrapped in brown paper, on the fire. This was 1964, not quite Archie Mountbatten-Windsor royal nativity.
On the whole, I think the place for the father is the pub, wetting the little un’s head rather than bothering the medics.
Bonding will come, when baby starts to walk, talk, sulk and misbehave, and eventually ask for the deposit on a flat. Parenthood is for life, not dad-dramatics on the maternity ward.
To rephrase Shakespeare’s Juliet, parturition is such sweet sorrow.
