Erikka Askeland: Royal Family is worth it for the horse factor

It was she who forced me and my cousin to watch the proceedings of the 1981 Royal Wedding on telly, the three of us among the estimated 750 million who did that day which for us started at an unfeasibly early hour considering it was the summer holiday.

Yet I don’t much recall any particular feelings of excitement. By then I had long since transferred a girlish admiration of princesses to an obsession with horses, which seemed to me to be much more noble and commendable.

But there was Prince Charles, or rather as he is in Scotland, the Duke of Rothesay, at a formal three course dinner in Edinburgh on a Wednesday night, with just me and 450 other people.

As president of the charitable organisation, Scottish Business in the Community, he was there mainly to hand out plaques to deserving business leaders who were being awarded for having done some good things other than just making profits or widgets. Greying and somewhat smaller than you might imagine in person, he spoke briefly, and made a few vague jokes.

I had been rather hoping he’d be now starting to take a leaf out of his father’s book and make some entertaining gaffes. No so, but he did use the mild oath “hell” the next day during his surprise stint as BBC Scotland weather man, which could just about pass for risque before the yard arm passed the gin o’clock watershed.

But on stage at the dinner he seemed just like any other nice but slightly dull bloke, albeit quite posh and in black tie.

Actually this may just be a measure of his cunning. It must take a great deal of effort to appear normal when you have been raised in palaces, offered weird gifts by legions of foreign dignitaries from birth, and never having taken a tenner out of a cash machine rather than twenty because it was getting to the end of the month and he was feeling a bit skint.

I once saw his sister, Princess Anne, let the facade of normality slip once. Not at the lunch we both attended yesterday at Scottish Business Achievement Awards Trust, but at an annual charity awards event of which she is the patron (dontcha know).

This was a few years ago. In fact, on that occasion I actually met her and for a moment held her gloved hand, which was as tiny and delicate as a sparrow.

I even have photographic evidence of the meeting – in which I seem to be saying something in an exaggerated manner, while her mask of a smile suggests she could have been thinking: “I’m royalty, get me out of here!”

In her speech that night, she mentioned something about how jolly nice it would be if everyone could return to using horse-drawn carriages because it would be more environmentally friendly than using cars. Which, as an argument, struck me as being completely bonkers, and perhaps only something someone used to riding in horse drawn conveyances from which to wave at passing crowds could even countenance.

It is not that I don’t feel privileged to attend dinners and luncheons where there are members of the Royal Family. But, like many normal people, it is something you mention as an idle aside, or put on a Facebook update rather than anything so momentous. They are just folk, after all, albeit ones that live lives of immense wealth and entitlement by sheer dint of being born.

In the taxi home the other night, my driver was less than impressed. “They are leeches,” he growled, as he went on to recommend a violent republican end for the lot of them, the suggestion of which could have got him hanged, drawn and quartered in previous centuries.

I could see his point, but actually I quite like having them around. Perhaps it is the girl in me who would actually have been wildly excited to see the return of horse-drawn carriages despite the environmental hazard of their manure clogging the streets. As relations of the head of state, they present a sort of reassuring narrative link through history that connects us and transcends the mundane grubbing of politics. And it impresses aunties.