The Prince Charles Letters (16 page)

Yours, hopefully

HRH The Prince of Wales

David Beckham

c/o The English Football Association

Soho Square

London

England

25 June 2008

Dear Mr Beckham

Last night, I had the strangest dream. In it, I had taken the place of yourself on that giant billboard in New York, resplendent and strapping in my underwear – and it was me who received a letter from you asking if I would help you get up to physical scratch for your next football game. I was thoroughly disconcerted by the request – it made me understand how you might have felt on receiving the same request from me in real life. On that basis, perhaps we had best forget this correspondence ever took place, don’t you feel?

Yours, &c

HRH The Prince of Wales

Sir Alex Ferguson

Manchester United Football Club

Old Trafford

Manchester

England

7 September 2010

Dear Sir Alex

Hoots! It’s a braw wee problem ye’ve got with the big feller Mr Rooney, I say. (It’s OK, I’m a Balmoral resident, I can banter on like this without causing offence – none of my ghillies do.) Man to man, however, I’d advise indulgence. He’s a young man and as my Uncle Louis used to say, young men need to sow their wild oats. I know I sowed my oats! It’ll be the same for this Wayne. Of course, that was before I was married … But once I was married, I settled down, er, well, for a while. Anyway, oats, I think, is what it’s all about. As a Scotchman I daresay you’ve had a few oats in your time so you’ll understand. I trust this has been helpful. I’d write on, but I’m a busy man and I expect you are too.

Yours, in Caledonian camaraderie

HRH The Prince of Wales

PS Your face seems to have cleared up dramatically. Is there a cream you might recommend? The bark I was advocated as a scrub only seems to be making mine worse, despite being organic. Actually, ignore all that stuff about oats – just small talk, really, working up to the thing about the cream. Between you and me, I don’t give a hang about Association Football.

Richard Keys and Andy Gray

c/o Sky Sports

London

England

20 January 2011

Dear Mr Keys and Mr Gray

I’m sending this to ‘Sky’ on the assumption that despite your ‘contretemps’, they’ll at least still forward your mail.

You’ll forgive me, I trust, but I must admit that until a few days ago, I hadn’t the faintest idea who the pair of you were but now you’re both on the scrapheap, I very much do. Funny thing, life, don’t you feel? Anyway, having witnessed the events of the last few days, with certain remarks you’ve been caught making off-camera concerning young women ‘smashing it’ and ‘do me a favour’, I thought a few avuncular words from a wise old hand might be welcome.

I’ve seen a lot of talk about the dangers of this sort of thing and of falling victim to a new ‘Thought Police’ in this ‘politically correct’ world we live in. Believe me, I understand. I have thoughts – I often have thoughts. Many of us do, I believe … long, hard thoughts. But notice how I do not tell you what these thoughts are and so, thoughts they remain. There, I believe, you came a cropper for it was not the ‘Thought Police’ you fell foul of, but the ‘Actually Came Out And Said Police’. A different branch, so to speak, of the Force.

I do hope this is of some comfort to you as you seek fresh employment – I visited a Labour Exchange once, you know. Fascinating!

Constructively, yours

HRH The Prince of Wales

Andy Murray

c/o The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club

Wimbledon

London

England

4 June 2011

So, once again, you’ve ‘come’ a cropper at Wimbledon. You must feel some days that it is simply never going to happen for you. It’s certainly beginning to look that way, isn’t it? I know that feeling – in fact, I have been rather gloomily prey to it just lately.

In the spirit, then of making lemonade of the lemons life hands one, I have a proposition. It seems that, like yourself, our young people are going to have to get used to the idea that they are simply not going to be able to realise the dreams they might have, their own ‘Wimbledons’, so to speak. In their case, I’m thinking of, you know, going to university, buying their own house, that sort of thing.

Can I suggest that, working together, we devise a series of seminars under the banner of REDUCING EXPECTATIONS – PREPARING FOR DISAPPOINTMENT. We would be the keynote speakers, advising the young on how to cope with the inevitability that for them, life is likely to be a series of crushing setbacks and the sooner they get used to the idea, the better. With your rather surly, morose manner, you would, I think, be perfectly suited to ‘convey’ this message. I hope that compliment does not make you blush!

Defeatedly, yours

HRH The Prince Of Wales

Sir John Betjeman

Poet Laureate

1 June 1976

Dear Sir John

As you recall, I wrote to you in May in my capacity as Chairman of the King George Jubilee Trust to compose upon the occasion of my mother, Her Majesty The Queen’s Jubilee Year. I was hoping you could dash off one of your perfectly formed bits of scansion in honour of the twenty-fifth anniversary of HM accession to the Throne.

Yesterday, I saw your effort and I must confess, I was somewhat dismayed. As Father might say, it was as if you really hadn’t put your back into it. You are Laureate, and with that comes honour and a stipend. In return we do expect a bit more effort. As an Englishman, you must rejoice in my mother’s long reign – you are jubilant, surely? One would not guess as much from lines like, ‘25 years/Gosh, is that how long it’s been?/Since you first became Queen/From Salisbury to Slough/We do salute thou’. I don’t want to be picky, but shouldn’t it be ‘thee’ and not ‘thou’ – which I suspect you only brought in so as to rhyme with ‘Slough’. And what is it, Sir, with you and Slough?

May I ask you to have another run-up at it – I’d hate to have to rope in Pam Ayres as ‘substitute’.

Yours, in mild disappointment tempered with hope

HRH The Prince of Wales

Jean-Paul Sartre

c/o The Louvre

Paris

France

20 April 1978

Dear Mr Sartre

I’m afraid I don’t have your address, but I daresay you look in now and again at the Louvre and someone there will spot you and pass this on to you.

I’m very interested in your philosophy of ‘Existentialism’. I’ve tried to ‘bone up’ on it, but there were certain excessively wordy passages I had to skip over. It seems to me that the nub of what you’re saying is all to do with the art, or idea of ‘being’ – hence the title of your book,
Being And Nothingness
.

Now it strikes me that the weakness of your ideas comes down to this whole concept of ‘being’ – being, as it were, the be-all and end-all of things. But here is the difference between my philosophy and yours (and where I like to think I have the upper hand): yours is all about ‘being’, mine is about ‘doing’. Anyone can sit about and simply ‘be’ all day. Some indeed would not so much call it ‘being’ as shirking! But ‘doing’ – getting things done? That’s a much tougher proposition. It’s what I look to do.

You must understand, M Sartre, that you argue things from an ‘intellectual’ position whereas under the influence of Laurens van der Post, I argue from the non-intellectual realm of the mind. Mind you, ‘hell is other people’ – I must agree about that. Bloody journalists, especially – so at least you have something right!

Yours, in
liberté
et f
raternité

HRH The Prince of Wales

Laurens van der Post

c/o The British Library

London

England

13 September 1980

Sir

You remain my guiding light, my inspiration in a world rendered foggy by the exhaust fumes of the toxic modern age. You once wrote the following: ‘We behave as if there were some magic in mere thought, and we use thinking for purposes for which it was never designed. As a result we are no longer sufficiently aware of what we cannot know intellectually, what we must know in other ways, of the living experience before and beyond our transitory knowledge’. I must say, I’d never thought of that before (is it a good or a bad thing, would you say?) but it certainly made a terrific impression on me.

And so yesterday, I decided to give it a try. Not thinking, that is: to sit down and empty one’s mind of all thoughts, switch off the mental engine; experience just living for a change. It’s jolly difficult – like squashing moles with a mallet! No sooner has one put one down and another pops out of another hole. I’d nearly ‘cracked it’ when out of nowhere, the ‘Ying Tong Song’ by The Goons – do you know it? – tootled through my head like a bally earworm and tiddle-eye-po, I was ‘back at square one’.

Any tips? Maybe I wasn’t sitting properly. Should I squat, perhaps? Trouble is, squatting hurts my lower back after a while.

Your faithful disciple

HRH The Prince of Wales

Ted Hughes

Poet Laureate

Devon

England

16 June 1987

Dear Mr Hughes

It has been said you write of ‘The struggle in the soil as well as the soul’. This has been well said of your verse and as a ‘soil and soul’ man myself, I fully concur. However, there is another struggle which I confess I have undergone in perusing your latest work: lines commissioned to commemorate my brother Edward’s
It’s A Royal Knockout
, which historians may well count as a crucial moment in the relationship between Monarch and the Common Man. It’s the struggle to work out what in blazes you’re on about!

I’ve read the whole thing and while there’s a great deal about owls and otters, the recurring misadventures of a crow entangled in a mesh of brambles, not to mention a ferret mauling a pregnant rabbit, I could find no direct reference to the television revelries – which, after all, were at the heart of the brief in the first place.

And hang it all, I know you’re modern and so forth, but would a rhyme or two here and there really hurt so much? I suspect this aversion to rhyme, like modern music’s aversion to tunes, is some sort of slacking, an avoidance of the real hard work of composition. Could you please take another look at it – once more, with rhymes? (I’d help you out, but the only thing I can think of that rhymes with ‘Edward’ is ‘dead wood’ and of course that isn’t at all suitable.)

Yours, &c

HRH The Prince of Wales

Alan Bennett

c/o The National Theatre

London

England

12 August 1994

Dear Mr Bennett

I was rather taken by your film
The Madness Of King George
– certainly plenty of food for one’s noggin there, especially for a future monarch. Is one on or off one’s rocker? How would one know? Would one’s staff bring to it to one’s attention if one showed marked and perturbing signs of eccentricity? It is gratifying to note thus far none of them has.

In that confidence, and also to counterbalance the King George thing, I was wondering – would you consider it worth your while to compose a companion play entitled
The Sensibleness of Prince Charles
? It would cover my thoughts on balancing the need to modernise with the horrors of modernity, of enjoying harmony with nature even as one is massacring its specimens and so forth. I am of course assuming you think my ideas sensible – happily, men and women generally seem to take this view. Don’t mention that I gave you the idea, should this come to fruition – it might seem immodest.

Discreetly yours

HRH The Prince of Wales

Tracey Emin

c/o Tate Modern

Bankside

London SE1

6 January 2000

Dear Miss Emin

You’ve been drawn to my attention as a ‘Young British Artist’. I’m rather an old British artist myself, but as such hope that I can pass on the benefit of my experience.

I’ve seen you on the television set more than once and both times you appeared ‘sozzled’. To me, this is symptomatic of the whole modern art movement, one that is dissipated, has rather lost its way and weaves unsteadily and uncertainly rather than moving forward. (Of course it is a maxim of mine that in order to move forward, you have to move backwards.) Everything about your work – I’m thinking of this ‘unmade bed’ exhibit, in particular – smacks of slacking and a lack of fresh air. I suggest that tomorrow morning, when you get out of your bed, don’t think of the resulting mess of duvet and crumpled sheets as ‘a work of art’ but work that needs to be done. Make that bed (remember, pillows plumped and ‘hospital corners’) and then armed with easel and watercolours, take the next coach out into the countryside, find the nearest waterfall and let your brush yomp freely, but figuratively across the canvas.

You’ll soon realise this whole ‘Modern Art’ thing is an adolescent fad, something you ‘get out of your system’ – like Donny Osmond or ‘Little Jimmy’ Osmond, or even dressing up as a Nazi. Things look the way they are because that’s how they’re supposed to look – that’s what Picasso failed to understand.

Yours, in perspective

HRH The Prince of Wales

Vidal Sassoon

60 South Molton Street

London

England

12 May 2002

Dear Mr Sassoon

I’m writing to you as Britain’s leading hair man but I’m not asking for a makeover, far from it! It’s just that, with respect, you and oneself – well, we’re on opposing sides of the spectrum. You see, you believe in fashion. And yes, fashion has been kind to you: it has made you your ‘boodle’. However, I do not believe in fashion because you see, Mr Sassoon, fashions change. They are here today, gone tomorrow. Has that ever occurred to you?

Now, take my own hairstyle. It has never been fashionable. One unkind writer once remarked that it looked as if it had been splurged on to my head using a Mr Whippy ice-cream dispenser. I can laugh off such remarks because my hair represents continuity. I have maintained it since I was twelve years old: it has outlasted several prime ministers, seen off rock’n’roll, The Beatles, the teddy boys, the punk rockers and everything else they’ve tried to throw at it.