ANYONE who wasn’t already a fan of Princess Anne certainly is after watching this week’s ITV documentary to commemorate her 70th birthday.
Anne is always referred to as the hardest working royal, and now it’s clear why, last year she had more than 500 engagements and it has been like that for half a century.
Princess Anne is often overlooked. She has always been there in the background, just quietly getting on with it, with absolutely no fuss.
Fuss, in fact, is clearly something that the royal has no time for as Anne was astonished to learn it takes Erin Doherty — the actress who plays her in the third series of The Crown — two hours to style her hair, as opposed to the “ten or 15 minutes” it takes Anne.
I loved the portrayal of the young princess in the Netflix series: Down to earth, feisty and straightforward, which I suspect is accurate to a tee.
I have always wondered whether the royals watch the drama and Princess Anne revealed she did and found it “quite interesting”.
She was followed for more than a year by the filmmakers of Anne: The Princess Royal At 70, which also featured unseen family footage and interviews with her loved ones.
I loved the stories from her children, Peter Phillips and Zara Tindall, describing how she would return from royal functions in her glamorous outfits and head straight to their farm to tend to the animals.
Zara said: “She’d come home from engagements in exactly what she was wearing, make-up on, put her welly boots on, jacket on, do her chickens and get her eggs.”
The appealing thing about Princess Anne is her work ethic and how happy she is to stay in the background.
Her husband, Vice Admiral Sir Timothy Laurence, said: “She’s not a person that is constantly looking for praise. She gets on and does her work regardless because she thinks it’s important.”
So it came as no surprise when Anne declared in the documentary that she would not go on Twitter “even if you paid me”.
Princess Anne is not the only hard-working royal, of course.
Her brother Prince Edward and his wife Sophie, the Countess of Wessex, do loads of good work and are similarly modest in their approach.
These members of the Royal Family are in stark contrast to Harry and Meghan, who claim that work is more important than anything else, but rarely get on with it quietly.
After all, Princess Anne does her job brilliantly, with no whinging or whining, and still remains out of the spotlight, which proves it can be done.
Another appealing trait of Anne’s is her modesty about how hard she works. She has no intention of slowing down, despite being old enough to retire.
She’s a credit to her family and the Queen — and the two of them clearly have a lot in common.
I loved watching them interact and seeing that mother-daughter bond. You can see there’s real affection there. And what a great, dry sense of humour they both have.
So it’s nice to watch something positive about the Royal Family these days.
By simply being herself in the documentary, Princess Anne has generated more positive PR for the monarchy than it has had in a very long while.
LOOKING at pictures of Gwyneth Paltrow on Instagram promoting a ready-to-drink brand of organic cocktails, I found myself thinking that no matter how much some people want to hate her, Gwyneth comes across as enviably wholesome, gorgeous, healthy . . . and probably a really nice person.
The bottom line is that anyone who says they hate her is almost certainly just jealous.
I AM so proud our national game has signed up to the Mentally Healthy Football Declaration, which urges young men – and men of all ages, in fact – to talk about their feelings, which is something males traditionally seem to struggle with.
We can talk about the THEORY of mental health all we like but the power of role models, particularly for young guys, is immense.
So it is lovely to see some footballing greats being open and honest about their own mental health – and the fact things haven’t always necessarily been rosy in the garden throughout their lives.
Spearheaded by the Duke of Cambridge, the campaign is designed to make mental health a priority across all levels of football.
So kudos to former England captain David Beckham, Aston Villa defender Tyrone Mings, Crystal Palace winger Andros Townsend and Manchester City and England skipper Steph Houghton for talking frankly about their own mental health and the state of play in football more generally.
Beckham, in particular, yields great influence. Hearing him talk about the effects of being vilified and abused by fans after he was red-carded against Argentina in the 1998 World Cup was very powerful.
“When I look back on it now, I didn’t realise how hard it was,” he says. “The times I’ve faced adversity throughout my career – and ’98 was by far the toughest – did I feel OK to go to someone and say I needed help? No. I felt I had to keep it all in and deal with it myself.
“Now I’m preaching to my kids and to other kids that it’s really important to talk. It’s OK not to be OK and it’s OK to say that. It’s OK to come out and say, ‘I need help’.”
Let’s hope young men everywhere take that on board and realise it’s good to talk.
WE should all take heart at the news that being pessimistic can seriously damage your health.
People with a negative outlook about the present or future die two years earlier than the average person, according to new research.
According to the Aussie team that did the research, from QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Brisbane, one reason for this might be that pessimists do not look after themselves as well, which has an impact on their health.
The world is half-full of pessimists . . . or half-empty, depending on how you look at it. But the bottom line is that a positive mind and spirit equal positive outcomes, while a negative mind and spirit equal negative outcomes.
So let’s all start looking on the bright side, shall we? Good. I am SO glad we had this chat.
HEARING what it takes for models to look the way they do is always interesting.
And by “interesting”, I mean it gives us a helpful reminder of how unrealistic expectations can be for women over their appearance.
Brazilian model Vanusa Freitas, 28 – who clearly DOES look amazing – has shared the secret of how she looks the way she does.
In preparation for a Playboy Portugal shoot, Vanusa exercised for eight hours a day and ate only egg whites.
She said she was inspired by Kim Kardashian, which perhaps gave her the necessary discipline to deny herself food and, by the sound of things, time to do much else but work out.
If spending the day in the gym and eating only egg whites is what is required to look like her, well . . . frankly, I’d rather have a life.
I SIMPLY do not understand why a former local councillor who worked in a children’s home was allowed to walk free after being caught with A MILLION disgusting images of child sex abuse.
Just reading the story made me feel sick.
Roger Spackman, 50, was a Labour member of Exeter City Council until his arrest in 2017 and worked at a secure children’s home.
But the judge assessing his case this week decided Spackman would not himself commit abuse – so handed him only a suspended jail term.
Yet the reality is that, by possessing these images, he is part of a cycle of horrific abuse.
Forty days of rehab is not going to change his desire to look at this kind of material.
Time in prison would be a more fitting consequence – and perhaps some deterrent for the people who produce horrific, disturbing images of children being harmed.
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