All aboard the William and Kate Covid express – next stop Scotland

William: You know, Kate, I’ve grown to quite like this lockdown business. Each morning I wake up without that sinking feeling when I know in a few hours I’ll be shaking hands with the unemployed and trying to remember where in the blazes we damn well are. And then trying to be enthusiastic about their collages of panel-beating down through the ages.

I tell you, sweetheart, Britain has become a nation of workshops. It’s been an absolute joy to wake up knowing the most onerous thing you’ll have to do is attend a lesson in how to use Zoom. D’you think now that people are getting accustomed to not shaking hands and hugging we could just, you know, dispense with it all together?

Kate: You don’t know you’re living, darling. I was talking to mummy and she pointed out what it must be like right now for all the cabin crew still ferrying the dafties to Tenerife and Cancun. She told me she was on a flight from Glasgow to Torremolinos and they all insisted on shaking hands, hugging her and slipping her their phone numbers. It sounded like when your uncle Andy has had a few swalettes and tells me I look like a La Perla underwear model. Talking of Andy, my love, where’s he been during the Covid?”

William: Well actually, princess – ha-ha princess, you actually are a princess – he’s been behaving very curiously, lately. He keeps taking clandestine, night-time trips to places like Newcastle and Manchester in a large coat, wig and sunglasses hoping to catch the virus so that he can maybe quarantine himself. He’s already tried to bribe one of the doctors on our payroll with one of mummy’s Gainsboroughs to fake a medical bulletin saying he’s on a ventilator to avoid extradition to the US. And I’m told that MI5 are training up a crack unit of special forces super-spreaders to locate Ghislaine Maxwell and infect her with a good dose of the Covid before she starts singing.

Kate: Did I tell you that mummy wants me to do a Zoom call with an organisation to help stressed airline workers that she’s become a patron of? It seems that after they all got laid off from BA they went to work for that dreadful Ryanair firm.

William: To be perfectly frank, honey, I’m more than a little cross with the PM for making us do this tour, but it was kind of made clear to me I had no choice in the matter. “Be a good chap, William,” he says, “and make a little tour round the country, you know to help lift the spirits. It’ll be a distraction from those damned Brexit negotiations.”

“Will I have to go to Scotland,” I asked him. I hear the Covid has transmuted into the Black Plague they had up there in the 1980s and they’re all running around with little bells shouting ‘unclean, unclean’ and dying in their thousands.”

“Same as every other day then,” says Boris. Damn has this carriage been swept for bugs? You know he tried to offer me shares? No questions asked, mum’s the word and all that. What a tawdry little spiv he is. I asked him to pass on the details through the usual channels, though. That new kitchen for the cottage cost much more than I thought and what with everyone asking questions about the allowances these days …

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Kate: Yes, but sweetheart, you are the once and future king and it’s a jolly good thing to get out and see your subjects and show them that you’re suffering along with them. What do you think I should wear? When I was at St Andrew’s everyone wore tweed pinafores and Manolo Blahniks, but I’m told a lot of the normals still don’t have shoes and wear plaid cloaks for the cold.

The Manolos might look out of place. Maybe something with rubber soles as they say the sewage system isn’t all it might be. And yet I’ve seen their First Minister wearing Louboutins, so maybe the Manolos will be OK. And do we have a gift for the NHS workers? I don’t know whose idea it was to have us handing over that sack of organic coal from your dad’s sustainable coal mine when we were in Yorkshire; I’m not sure they appreciated it.

William: Oh, don’t worry about that, sweetheart. It’s only Edinburgh we’re going to so just smile and say ‘you’re doing an awfully good job’ or ‘are you getting much gardening done, this weather’. Edinburgh’s the only city in

Scotland where the houses have gardens so keep making horticultural references and stuff about horses. They all keep horses, apparently. I drew the line at Glasgow because they all want to share their wine with you and ask you how your mother’s keeping. Absolutely no boundaries. And apparently they keep drinking the hand sanitiser.

Kate: Darling, I was reading that the Nicola Sturgeon woman is making unkind comments about us breaking travel restrictions. What if there’s a demonstration?”

William: Don’t worry about that either, my love. The PM told me that in Edinburgh they only demonstrate when the free bar stops at Festival premieres. He also made a comment about me still having the droit de seigneur and then gave me one of those lewd winks of his. What a wretched, seedy man he is. And remember to wear that nice, surgical gown with the matching face mask they gave you when we visited that hospital in Windsor. You know, the stripy one with the lace trimmings. We need to show solidarity with the NHS workers.

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