Rosemary McLeod: Inconvenient Charles

As someone who also suffers from bouts of severe shyness, I sympathise with the Prince of Wales, who has only £13 million ($27 million) a year, and a dowager lady wife in box pleats, to comfort him.
It has to do with dominant mothers. My childhood was plagued by my mother's horrible box Brownie camera recording me with increasingly sullen expressions in front of the sights of my home town Wellington (the duck pond, the duck pond and the duck pond). I hated it.
I stared stonily at the ducks; winced and died inside on top of the stone lions at the zoo gates while bystanders stopped to gawk, and small boys poked their tongues out; posed with a magnificent pout in ballet costume and, most cringingly of all, playing the cello.
"She's gone all gooey!" my mother would cry merrily, and I'd die inside just that little bit more.
It was done with the best of intentions. My mother was vain, in love with the camera and the limelight, and only accidentally a sadist.
She treated me as she would have liked to have been treated herself, but unfortunately I wasn't her.
Neither is Prince Charles, even more intensely documented from birth, the Queen. She remains regal, the embodiment of sang-froid, the one with the job.
He's a goofball, a dear old duffer and has morphed into The Man Who Never Was.
You'd have wondered, during coverage of the great wedding of his son the other day, if Charles had maybe got lost on his way to the cathedral washroom.
Possibly he was banging on the door and calling plaintively for help as an entranced world watched his son's nuptials, or checking roses for greenfly.
He might as well not have been there; he got almost no attention from the fawning media, and neither did his brothers or sister.
They've become the redundant gene pool of the English aristocracy, no longer fascinating for their romantic intrigues or - God forbid - their fashion sense.
It's as if William sprang fully formed from the folds of a Versace gown worn by his late mother, needing no fertilisation process, a glittering example of parthenogenesis. There was no mention of William's parents' equally magnificent wedding at St Paul's Cathedral, with a similar mob of notables and nobles, and fascinated audience of billions.
It's an event best forgotten now, because of his father's subsequent weakness of character as a husband, and the frosty failure of the royal family to look after and shelter the girl - William's mother - barely out of childhood and married, it seems, merely to beget heirs.
This was no time, either, to dwell on Charles' current wife's conduct as his then-mistress, though it was pleasing to see how the ex-femme fatale had become so dumpy.
Following Princess Diana's awful death, intense interest in royalty waned.
Sure, there've been the troll sisters Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice, and their wild-card mother, the Duchess of York, but they're neither pretty nor classy, more an ongoing embarrassment.
The last time the Queen came to New Zealand I was one of a straggling group of about 20 who stood outside Parliament to watch her arrive for an evening banquet.
She wore one of her faultless long formal dresses.
Prime Minister Helen Clark looked as if she hadn't bothered to change out of her housekeeping clobber.
The world's sights are now set on the newly married couple, in the expectation that Kate's ovaries are in working order.
She won't be allowed to get a job for the rest of her life, so what can she do all day, while Wills is at work, but supervise her housekeeper, and gestate?
Charles being the actual heir to the throne seems to be a mere glitch in the succession, one that will be smoothed over somehow if the current queen ever dies.
Lacking a suitable profile to appear on British stamps, I'm picking that Charles is not only The Man Who Never Was, but The Man Who Never Will Be, either.