Keep Calm and Fake a British Accent

Two Australian Radio DJ's might have taken this a little too literally last week when calling the hospital Kate Middleton was in last week, pranking two nurses and resulting in one of their suicides. I'm not here to rehash all the details (my favourite online newspaper Daily Mail can do that for you) but it did get me thinking of the obsession I, and many others evidently, have with the royals.

One of my earliest scrapbooking memories was as a young child paging through all my mom's old magazines hunting for pictures of Princess Diana. My room was plastered with posters, photos, newspaper clippings of my hero. Now if I, as a young South African girl, growing up on a farm in the middle of no where, was this obsessed, I can only imagine how others within her reach must have been.

Fast forward a good few years and hundreds of us (both male and female) crammed into our office canteen to watch as her son tied the knot to Kate Middleton. I don't think that anyone, especially my male colleagues, could quite put their fingers on what exactly our fascination with the wedding was but we all knew that we wouldn't leave until it was done. Prehaps it's the real life fairy tale element that keeps us intrigued or the fact that an ordinary girl can be given extraordinary opportunities.

Regardless of the reason, I hope that the tragedies of the past will not again be repeated. That we as "royal-watchers" can respect the gravity of the consequences when some take it too far.