White House staffers can be so cruel. According to Vanity Fair, America’s first family are furious about their giggling new nickname for the president’s fashion-forward daughter, Ivanka Trump. Behind her back, she is called the Princess Royal. That is, of course, a jab about her alleged air of entitlement. But is there anything so wrong about being compared to our Princess Anne, who is in fact the current official holder of the Princess Royal title, which traditionally goes to the monarch’s eldest daughter? (Tiffany Trump, Donald’s 24-year-old younger daughter, is therefore not entitled to this nickname, no matter how grand she gets.)
Our Princess Royal is the unpretentious, roll-your-sleeves-up working royal who is really keen on horses. Granted, she once told reporters to “naff orf!” – and “naff” might not have been the word she used – and was once fined because her bull terrier Dotty attacked two children.
Yet historically the Princesses Royal have been an unexceptionable lot. Before Anne, the Princess Royal was the now forgotten Princess Mary, daughter of George V, whose husband, the Earl of Harewood, proposed to her after losing a bet at his club. She reportedly refused to attend the 1947 wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Philip Mountbatten in protest because her brother, the disgraced Duke Of Windsor, was not invited.
I don’t think Ivanka quite suits the title Princess Royal. Donald, however, could be renamed George III.
A forch in the road
Like a man cramming his spilling waistline into a pair of crisply laundered blue jeans, I was this week paralysed by a sudden age-inappropriate, everything-inappropriate desire to use the millennial word “unforch” in a text. This is a term that should only be used by 15-year-old Instagram influencers with 2 million followers and a six-figure promotional deal with Tom Ford.
But unforch, I had the urge to say “unforch” when “sadly” would have been less offensive and would have conveyed entirely the same thing with two fewer letters. Anyway, I thought that I was rather elegantly conveying a little bit of self-aware humour in using this word. But unforch, no. I looked like Dirk Bogarde at the end of Death in Venice, being carried dead off the beach, the pathetic black hair-dye streaming down his face.
Later I took to Twitter for guidance on the age cutoff for saying “unforch”. Pointless star Richard Osman told me that one should stop around 65, when one becomes a “pench”. Giles Coren said that it is, in fact, a class cutoff: Tatler girls only, aged between 18 and 55. However, perhaps rashly, I intend to keep saying it. With enough chutzpah I’m sure I can carry it off. Forch favours the bold.
That went down well
The world of canoeing in Italy has been startled by proposals for an unsinkable kayak called the Surfcruise, put forward by a 21-year-old designer, Rossella Schettino. She says that her dad has helped her with the design. This is the legendary Francesco Schettino, the captain who in 2012 wrecked his cruise ship, the Costa Concordia, by steering it close to the rocks to impress a dancer with whom he was having an onboard liaison.
There is something rather magnificent in Rossella not merely going into the unsinkable water-vehicle business but defiantly invoking her dad as an influence. The Costa Concordia itself is also legendary in filmgoing circles as the location for Jean-Luc Godard’s 2010 movie, Film Socialisme. Brilliantly intuiting its terrible fate, Godard used top-heavy cruise ships like the Costa Concordia as symbols of capitalism.
Perhaps Godard may now make a short, sharp film about Rossella’s new kayak.
• Peter Bradshaw is the Guardian’s film critic
