The kingdom was shaken by another shattering royal revelation last week when Lord West revealed that when he was briefly given custody of the queen mother’s handbag, he opened it and – brace yourselves – “it was completely empty”.
I am struggling to process this. Not even a hip flask and some corgi treats? Who carries an empty handbag? Perhaps Lord West glimpsed one of several compartments and misunderstood the bag’s complex internal geography.
Because a handbag should have the menacing heft of a kettlebell; it should make osteopaths weep and unscrupulous spine-crackers rub their hands with glee. A correctly stocked handbag is a bottomless tub of sordid discoveries. A fraying unwrapped tampon, a pick’n’mix of loose pills, a year-old after-dinner mint that has lost its foil and a single sock are the bare minimum. Back in the days of landlines, I once rummaged in mine and realised I had brought the home phone out with me. Another time, I happened upon a large piece of cheese rind.
Even the heavily sanitised and stylised designer bags celebrities present on Vogue’s In the Bag video feature – absolutely compelling content for me – are stuffed. Florence Pugh has dog poo bags, Tabasco and paracetamol; Coleen Rooney has pilates socks and instant coffee; Charli xcx has a banana (the worst handbag fruit) and hair extensions.
What do I, a similarly aspirational individual, have in mine? I’m glad you asked. I investigated and inventoried 76.75 items, including 13 earplugs, 6.75 loose almonds (almost enough to lure Barack “seven almonds” Obama somewhere!), several fragments of a broken decongestant bottle, four lens cloths (all too grubby to clean anything), two knives, two forks and one spoon, three salt packets, five Lemsip capsules, a sim card for a mystery phone, the business card of a board-game designer I met in November 2022, two toothbrushes and an RSPB hedgehog badge. Oh, and a pomelo the size of a human head.
I am confident everyone else’s handbag is similar (barring, possibly, the pomelo). It’s yet more proof that the royal family is absolutely not like us.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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