Meghastar

My dreams are getting weirder but are still usually along the lines of homes and belongings. Last night (probably due to spending too much time on Rightmove) I completed on a terraced house in Cambridge ‘in need of improvement.’ The neighbours introduced themselves as they boarded a bus to an Anglican Church convention and I expressed my support for the steadfastness of the Anglican Church. I think I was trying to ingratiate myself as I’m highly unlikely to do this in real life. The house was full of abandoned kids’ things such as books and sets of those collectible cards that you get with magazines. A boy was in there hiding behind something that was like one of those children’s playcars that we used to have. I asked him to leave and take the toys with him to save me having to recycle them. Then I woke up.

I watched the Meghan and Harry interview with Oprah Winfrey. To me, they exude a lot of integrity and honesty. There is no masterplan behind Meghan’s love story with Harry. There is no hypocrisy that they do an interview like this whilst trying to take a step back from royal life. Their primary aim is to speak their story and stop being caged by a press machine. With the sense of injustice at how the press has behaved around them, I would be consumed by the same need as a way of getting some closure.

Tradition and convention are not synonymous with good, truth and rightfulness; in fact they often directly suppress fairness and openness. The amount of vitriol being levelled towards them, overwhelmingly towards Meghan, is staggering. Why is there such a refusal to hear their words and try and listen to them fairly? Why so often do people, in all sorts of situations, deny the lived experience of others in favour of their own pre-conceived inaccurate version of events?

As Meghan said, she was ‘being judged on the perception but living the reality.’

If you were Harry wouldn’t you just be raging beyond all belief that the press hounded your mother to death and was pursuing your wife in the same way? The anger would be all-consuming.

This is how every one of us could end up feeling if we were in Meghan or Harry’s skin. People’s situations are always relative. The fact that we aren’t them and that we don’t know much about the actual situation means we’re not qualified to judge them. They are allowed to state their truth and we should accept it with an open-minded attitude over the pre-judged, extremely cynical approach.

Ideally every day but at least on International Women’s Day, listen to and believe Meghan’s voice as a woman and a mother who has been treated unfairly.