How I’m avoiding the rabbit hole of Kate Middleton conspiracy theories

I really didn’t want to buy into all this hype about the so-called disappearance of Princess Catherine – Kate to you and I – but something has compelled me.

Was I truly concerned about her welfare and feared that she had been kidnapped, had run away from the royal family (always a possibility) or had just cracked it with everyone and decided to go on strike after surgery? The conspiracy brigade out there in cyberland have certainly been working overtime in inventing new and amazing plots. To say that some of these plots reveal the vacuous lives of their creators is to state the bleeding obvious.

Now, of course, we know that her situation is far more serious, a cancer diagnosis. It is one that many around the world face and one that is frightening, calling on all your inner reserves to deal with. I wish her a speedy recovery and a long future ahead to share with her children.

No, I really wasn’t concerned about any of the hysterical hype and theories. And I wasn’t really concerned about her privacy issues truth be told. She has abrogated a great deal of that by signing up to the job of royalty, a role where the expectation is that you dangle your privacy over the cliff edge, welcoming the attention to keep the job happening and relevant and the public purse spent on your job.

My concern was a little more oblique. I looked at the family photo that was released the other week – beautiful children, all smiling, all huddled around mum. Delightful I thought, then came all the hoo-ha about it being doctored and then it was removed from press circulation. What struck me as appalling was the fact that the family felt it needed to be photoshopped, at all. Why do they, and by extension us, have to have a version of reality, the perfect picture, to present to the world? 

Have we become so obsessed with beauty, with a fantasy version of ourselves that we can no longer just take an old-fashioned snap of ourselves and be happy to have that moment memorialised on digital data? 

Now I know the royal family is of far more media importance than you and I; they are the media version of a constant goldmine, to be trawled over, picked at, salivated over, regaled on the front covers of women’s magazines (a sure fire way to make sales and money) and generally held up to appallingly high standards of dress sense and fashion. But we are part of that expectation, we set the scene, we buy the magazines and live a vicarious life ogling over their antics and fashion sense.

And we (in the broadest sense of the word) create the conspiracy theories and wander down rabbit holes of inanity, trying to explain why a poor soul needed some privacy while she came to terms with a diagnosis that none of us would want. 

I am tired of the Instagram brigade fawning over themselves to create the perfect picture, the pressure to only show the world their doctored reality. I want normal photos of normal people doing normal things. How difficult is that? 

What’s the strangest conspiracy theory you’ve heard about Princess Catherine? How do you avoid online speculation? Let us know in the comment section below.

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