by David Stubbs
So, what do you say, ‘Big Lad?’ I’m proposing a course in vocal tuition. After three months, I want to surprise my polo team-mates by declaring in your own, stentorian manner, ‘FOR MISSING FROM THERE, YOU WANT BLOODY SHOOTING!’ Primarily it’s the emphasis I like, as opposed to that Northern coarseness, amusing as it is in its proper place.
Yours, vocally
HRH The Prince of Wales
Jonny Wilkinson
c/o Rugby Football Union
Rugby House
Twickenham Stadium
Twickenham
Middlesex
England
20 December 2003
Dear Mr Wilkinson
‘Jonny Wilkinson drops for World Cup Glory! … ’ Yes, I listened to the commentary on my transistor radio and, along with the rest of the United Kingdom, threw my cap in the air as I imagined the rugger pill sailing over the bar for three vital points against our Commonwealth friends and sporting rivals, the Australians.
In your case, Rugby Union was clearly character building. If that is the case, then in the light of my rugger playing days at Gordonstoun, I should be the greatest character on earth. For me, the scrum wasn’t an exciting goal-scoring opportunity but a sort of makeshift torture chamber, in which one was subject to every conceivable poke, hack, discreet but eye-wateringly painful toe-punt, rabbit punch and tweak. Whenever the ball came to me, I was at once trampled over as if by an army retreating at speed in hobnail boots across a tin bridge.
I do not know what it is to watch a ball sail over the bar for a conversion but I do know how the ball felt; on one occasion, in an inter-form challenge, I was physically hurled over the bar itself by an older, burlier boy – Reggie Bagshaw – like some tossed human caber. The referee turned a blind eye and when I told my father about the incident, he got up from the table and strode down the corridor, his belly laugh echoing long and loud behind him. In short, Wilkinson, even as I whooped, I winced. I trust you understand.
Yours, in both pleasure and pain
HRH The Prince of Wales
Jonny Wilkinson
c/o Rugby Football Union
Rugby House
Twickenham Stadium
Twickenham
Middlesex
England
29 December 2003
Dear Mr Wilkinson
Further to my letter of the other day, which I trust you received safely, one other point: as I mentioned, I’m a ‘rugger man’ myself and my father, Prince Philip, would now and again come and shout exhortations to me from the touchline. I can’t in all honesty say I always relished this.
‘Take the bull by the balls, boy!’ he used to cry out. ‘You’ve must take the bull by the balls!’ Taken literally, that always struck me as an ill-advised thing to do – you might well anger the beast. Got to admit, it left me confused rather than encouraged, and inside a scrum with form boys ill-disposed towards you at the best of times is not a place to be beset by confusion.
What do you think he was driving at? Is it some more widely used rugger term? Did you ever get it? If so, I hope it proved more of a ‘spur’ to you than me.
Yours, &c
HRH The Prince of Wales
José Mourinho
Chelsea FC
Stamford Bridge
London
England
8 September 2004
Dear Mr Mourinho
Hola! I notice I’ve yet to welcome you to the United Kingdom – very remiss of me, but ‘better late than never’. I can’t help noticing, however, that you have become notorious for declaring yourself to be ‘the special one’ and carrying yourself with a certain, haughty arrogance.
I’d advise against this. You will find us an essentially modest people, not given to ‘swanking’ and you will not achieve any kind of success in England if you carry on in this way. It is not our custom. In fact, your football club might even run the risk of ‘relegation’. I’d commend you to study the example of our English managers – Graham Taylor, for example. Watch how he carries himself, and learn.
Instructively, yours
HRH The Prince of Wales
Miss Paula Radcliffe, MBE
c/o The Amateur Athletics Association
London
England
20 April 2005
Dear Miss Radcliffe
I was sorry to hear of the toilet mishap during your latest race. I happened to have left the room when it occurred, but Prince Harry described the incident to me in excessive detail on my return and I sympathise. Once, during the second chukka of a vital Polo game on which the season hinged, I found myself quite unaccountably and urgently seized by a Call of Nature. And it was, I fear, Mr Brown and several members of his family who were knocking at the door.
It seemed impossible, that I would be overwhelmed at any second, but I thought of Rorke’s Drift and the English spirit that maintains the garrison in the face of intense pressure. I stiffened every sinew and held out for the vital three minutes whereupon I dismounted. Knees almost buckling, I somehow made my way to a ‘Portaloo’, where I experienced perhaps the most profound sensation of relief I have ever known in my time on this earth. Indeed, I wonder if, sitting in that rather smelly, cramped and barely sanitary cubicle, I came as close as I ever have to true happiness in this life. (I suppose I shall be dubbed a hypocrite as an advocate of ecological causes for not taking a spade, digging a hole and voiding into it, but believe me, there simply wasn’t the ‘time’.)
Next time this happens, think of my example. Then, like me, you will avoid making an utter fool of yourself in public.
Yours, in sympathy
HRH The Prince of Wales
David Beckham
c/o The English Football Association
Soho Square
London
England
23 June 2008
Dear Mr Beckham
First of all, allow me to thank you once again for participating in my Highgrove Impromptu Five-A-Side-A-Thon which, you’ll be gratified to know, raised £2,000 for the local underprivileged – which I hope will be spent wisely on their behalf. I apologise again for the roughness of some of the young Prince Harry’s tackles, particularly the one necessitating your hobbling off for a touch of the ‘Magic Sponge’. The boy is red-haired and impetuous (I’m not sure where he gets it from). I trust the crocus-derived balm I advised you to rub into the affected area did the trick?
I write because I happened to be in New York recently and was most taken aback to see a rather gigantic poster of you draped across the frontage of the department store Macy’s, clad in nothing but a pair of somewhat snug undergarments. I trust you won’t be disconcerted when I tell you I had my driver linger at the spot as I looked you up and down in fascination until the build-up of Manhattan traffic expressed itself in a raucous ejaculation of horns and we pootled on up 34th Street.
Later, in my hotel suite, I stared at myself clad only in briefs in a full-length mirror and realised how short I fall of the physical ideal. Hang it all, I’m a middle-aged man but there must be something I can do to get closer to being the model ‘muscular Christian’ (or muscular Defender of Many Faiths)? I was wondering, therefore – could you perhaps look in again next time you’re in the country and perhaps devise a routine that really puts me through my physical paces? In return, I could give you some tips about public speaking. I’m afraid you do have a habit of lapsing into some sort of Estuary mumble – I could help you with this.
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 he
lp 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
Deep Thinkers, Eminences of the Higher Arts
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 fraternité
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
