It turns out that being preoccupied about mental health hasn’t worked for the Prince of Wales. The man who has made being in touch with his emotions his USP is, it turns out, in no fit state to look at Hamnet. “I need to be in a calm state”, he told someone at the Baftas who asked him if he’d seen it, “and I am not at the moment”. Well, we can excuse him not wanting to watch Hamnet, which sounds gosh-awful (see AN Wilson’s review in this paper), but putting his understandable reluctance down to not-being-calm does suggest that this youngish man is cut from a different cloth from his late grandmother.
In the Keep Calm and Carry on era, you weathered the disgrace of your family members either by retreating to the country or by putting a brave face on things. It would seem that the heir to the throne is a little more fragile than that. He is the man who once observed, “I take a long time trying to understand my emotions and why I feel like I do, and I feel like that’s a really important process to do every now and again, to check in with yourself and work out why you’re feeling like you do”.
