A girl would suffer from unbearable scrutiny as she grew
Having never had much interest in the royals, I find myself hoping for a baby boy, almost fretting about it. The Duchess of Cambridge has undertaken her final public engagements: a ship-naming ceremony in Southampton docks and the Trooping the Colour.
Now she will rest before the birth, in around a month's time. As I said, I'm not much of royalist (I'm not even interested enough to be anti-monarchy), but purely on a human level, let's hope that the child is healthy and happy. On the same human level, let's also hope that it's a boy.
Outside the royal family, few know the sex of the baby, but that hasn't stopped the speculation. Prince Harry was rumoured to have said that it was a boy. The duchess was thought to have almost blurted the word "daughter" on a walkabout, though this was explained away as a misunderstanding.
Of course, if the baby does turn out to be a girl, it would be history in the making. A first-born girl would succeed to the throne. Imagine the succession blether – it would never (ever) end. It would swirl around that child's head in the manner of a bad fairy from a storybook bringing along a cursed gift to a christening.
But that wouldn't be all. A first-born girl is one thing, but a daughter born to William and Kate at any point would still have to contend with the thorny legacy of Diana.
William and Harry were fortunate in their gender – lucky to be boys. It was bad enough to be the sons of Diana. Could you imagine the feeding frenzy over the daughter of Diana – then, tragically, the bereaved daughter?
Even so, there have been times when William has seemed barely able to contain his contempt and rage for an outside world that wouldn't stop scrutinising him. You know those people you deal with where you end up wanting to say sarcastically: "So, what makes you love your job so much?" At times, that's been my feeling about William.
So imagine if he'd been "Diana's girl", the sole female repository of a nation's love and grief, but also of its insatiable hunger for gossip and drama. The endless mawkish comparisons, wailing headlines and maudlin snippets. "Walking among landmines, continuing her mother's work"; "Looking just like her mother"; "The tilt of her head reminding everyone of her mother"; "Developing bulimia like her mother". Well, let us hope not the last one. The point is that whatever the princes suffered in terms of unwanted attention and irrational comparisons, a princess could only have endured infinitely worse.
That other princess, Anne, never seemed to make an impact in the same way – she made damn sure of that. Not only was it different back then, but Anne managed to turn herself and, to an extent, her daughter into low-key stable hands. Clever, stubborn Anne! Maybe it was partly because of Anne's determined non-starriness, the fashion sense endearingly reminiscent of a docker, that Diana became such a powerful emotional figurehead for the nation and beyond.
The People's Princess or the people's spittoon? During Diana's short lifetime it was never fully clear. However, even Diana enjoyed a couple of decades growing up in relative normality, peace, and privacy, before the relentless judgment began.
This is why the arrival of a girl would be troubling. On top of the succession, that child would be the first direct female link to not only the heaving emotional tsunami that was Diana, but also the cloying sense of public ownership of Diana.
It's hard to envision how she and her parents could fail to be engulfed by it. So, health and happiness to that baby, just as one would extend to any newborn. Still, it might be better all round if the poor little mite were a boy.
Before I gag, save me from this preposterous pair
Mais non! Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke are back in Before Midnight, the last in Richard Linklater's Before trilogy. At least, I hope it's just a trilogy and this is the last, and they're not going to continue trailing around Europe (Greece this time), emoting, pouting and glaring self-pityingly into their authentic espressos.
Ever since this exhibitionist drivel began, otherwise sentient people have been sobbing into their popcorn about thwarted love and the passing of time. Why? Having watched the first two films, Delpy (usually so wonderful) is a rambling, fey idiot as Celine. She makes French women look like bunny-boilers sans lapin. Hawke is a charmless narcissist and I don't care for his character Jesse either. Together, they're the most annoying cinema couple since Tom met Meg at the top of the Empire State Building in Sleepless in Seattle and neither had the good grace to jump off.
However, this time Jesse and Celine are together, with children, reality setting in. That must lower the smug quotient. No one's skipping around European landmarks when a screaming toddler needs a Capri-Sun opened or a Stickle Brick removed from its nose. Perhaps I'll tune in for a gloat after all.
A cut too far for Britain's surgeons
Health secretary Jeremy Hunt says that surgeons who refuse to hand over performance data for the NHS "league tables", as they are entitled to do, will be named and shamed. Hunt says that surgeons have no valid reason for not making their rates of death available. What absolute rot.
Most surgeons are co-operating on giving the data, but this doesn't mean there aren't good reasons not to. Different surgeons perform different kinds of operations at different levels of risk. Many who perform high-risk operations on high-risk patients do so because, putting it bluntly, that's the gig. From premature babies, to heart patients, patients with disabilities and/or additional conditions, morbidly obese patients, patients with potential to react adversely to anaesthetic, and so on, there are myriad complex factors affecting the outcome of operations.
For such surgeons, this system of "trial by league table" is absurd. Capable committed surgeons undertaking difficult-to-hopeless cases no one else would touch with the proverbial bargepole would come out resembling barbarous maniacs. Meanwhile, their more tentative, possibly less able, certainly less active colleagues would boast unblemished records.
We're told that data would be adjusted to account for the severity/complexity of all cases, but how could this be realistically implemented? Moreover, who is going to convince nervous patients that the surgeon who resembles Sweeney Todd on the league table is actually the one with the expertise and hard-won experience to help them?
The most likely outcome is an NHS run by jumpy administrators refusing to green light high-risk operations, however essential, because their figures might look bad. Most gallingly, all this is being done in the name of patient power and transparency, when it's quite the opposite. Wary surgeons, inhibited by league tables, are the last thing patients need.
     |
 |
| READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.guardian.co.uk |