When Prince Harry was 15, he had his head shoved into the carcass of a deer he’d just shot on a hunt.
It was, as he recalled many years later in his memoir Spare, a pretty grim moment.
And yet at the same time, a perfectly ordinary one for the extraordinary family he was born into, an initiation as old as the Balmoral hills where it took place.
When I met Harry at his home in Montecito to talk about said memoir three years ago, I couldn’t help but mention this whole blood-letting ritual, because as aristocratic a rite of passage as it was, it still seemed a little brutal to me. (Then again, quite a lot of his childhood seems awful to me, not least having to walk behind his mother’s coffin in front of the eyes of the world when he was just 12.)
As we sat in his guest house drinking tea, with a roaring fire protecting us from the unseasonably cold and rainy Californian weather outside, I brought the moment up.
It had happened just three years after his mother died, when Harry was in such a state of unprocessed grief, he genuinely believed Diana had merely disappeared and would one day return.
As I read this passage in the book, where he describes the ‘old-school’ hunting guide shoving his head into the dead stag’s belly, all I could feel was maternal horror. Good grief, who was looking after this boy?
Bryony and Prince Harry sat in his guest house drinking tea, with a roaring fire protecting them from the unseasonably cold and rainy Californian weather outside
When I told Harry this, he nonchalantly shrugged it off. ‘It’s interesting because so many of those moments have made me the man I am today,’ he told me.
‘Would I encourage Archie to stick his head inside a carcass? Probably not.’
Times have changed, parenting styles have changed, and Prince Harry has most certainly changed. I thought about our chat this week, when Harry spoke about the need for each generation of parents to ‘upgrade’ on what had come before them.
Talking at a conference on fatherhood and mental health in Melbourne, the 41-year-old said he had to ‘cleanse’ himself of his past before he had children.
He spoke about having ‘conversations… that never existed between me and my parents’, and that he saw parenting as ‘evolving over time’.
‘The reality is that, however you are parenting – that is a personal experience to you, you are going to want to improve on that.’
He’s talking, of course, about the very human desire to get the things right that you felt your own parents got wrong.
We’ve all got issues from our childhoods that we’re adamant about not handing down to our own children – for me, it’s endless talk about diets and the importance of being thin. It’s just that most of us don’t have to spark a constitutional crisis in an bid to break away from them.
Still, the intergenerational issues between Harry and the King are hardly unique to them. Almost all of us know a family in which an adult child has become estranged from their mum or dad because they went to therapy and decided to go their own way. You’d be surprised by how much emotional healing involves intense pain. Or perhaps you wouldn’t.
Harry has spoken about his approach to fatherhood – and his relationship with his own father
Harry and I spoke about this a lot. We chatted about a theory I’d heard from a therapist when I was in rehab in 2017.
The therapist said that all dysfunctional families work like a toy mobile over a child’s cot. Every member of the family has a specific role to play – such as the black sheep, or the golden child, or the clown – and in doing this, they keep the mobile balanced.
But the moment someone rejects their role – by getting sober, or having therapy, for example – the whole thing can tip on its side. When Harry ‘the clown’ (and ‘spare’) had therapy and decided he wanted a different role, it unbalanced a system entirely unprepared to deal with anyone who is seen as upsetting the apple cart. It is the same in all dysfunctional families whether they’re royal or one like mine in the suburbs of London.
Harry had also heard this theory. ‘It’s exactly the same analogy that my therapist here brought up with me,’ he told me.
‘I have been referred to as a cycle breaker, I didn’t know what that meant. But yes, if I am someone who is trying to ensure that this generational handing down of trauma stops at me, then I guess that makes me a cycle breaker.’
But cycle breaking has its own cycle within it, too. It tends to start with the angry phase we’ve all seen played out through estrangement, before you hopefully pass on to a place of acceptance, and then forgiveness.
You realise that your poor mum/dad/caregiver was simply trapped in a cycle with their parents, and one day, your own children are probably going to come at you for the parenting you were only doing your best with, too.
Listening to Harry this week, I really got the sense this is the stage he’s at with his father. He sounded forgiving, empathetic.
‘There’s no judgment, there’s no blame, there’s no pointing the finger,’ he said, during that same event in Melbourne this week.
It was a comment that didn’t draw quite as much attention as his assertions about cleansing himself of the past, but let’s hope the King heard it, and that a new cycle can begin soon.
Lay off Binky, freebies are part of her business!
Am I the only one who feels sorry for Binky Felstead? She asked a bakery if they fancied making her son a free birthday cake in return for some exposure on Instagram – a suggestion that led to the business shaming the former Made In Chelsea star on social media. Like it or not, influencers like Binky are also businesses. And if brands don’t like ‘freebie’ culture… they’re welcome to pay influencers for adverts, instead.
Former Made In Chelsea star Binky Felstead asked a bakery if they fancied making her son a free birthday cake in return for some exposure
Why Ted Lasso’s Brett is perfect for J.Lo
According to reports, J.Lo has grown close to her colleague, the British actor and Ted Lasso star Brett Goldstein. They met on the set of a new Netflix romcom, in which they play a couple of workaholics enjoying a secret office romance. Cynics might say that the rumours are designed to drum up publicity for the movie, but thankfully, I’m not a cynic, just a hopelessly gullible romantic. Somebody pass me the popcorn.
Jennifer Lopez and Brett Goldstein in official Office Romance photo from Netflix
A poll of 13 to 16-year-olds found financial independence is more important to them than getting married. The research, by PGL, also found that only 56 per cent of Generation Alpha want children.
Frankly, they are right to favour money over matrimony because in my experience, if they do want to get hitched, they’re going to need a few quid to shoulder the cost, which is currently a staggering £21,990 on average.
