Every time a new year comes, do you know what I feel like doing? I feel like wearing all-white designer clothes to run on the beach and write something superficially profound but also completely stupid in the sand.
I want the vibe to be a tampon ad meets global mission statement, and I want to get my big bare feet out, so the world can see another one of my superpowers, which is that I don’t need to put a pair on. of skis when I water ski.
I am simply wonderful, a saint in a boyfriend shirt, a writer of banana-based wisdom, a savior of chickens, a baker of cakes, a healer of imagined slights and a collector of grievances, just like my dear prince.
Watch me laugh as I jump across the beach, pretending life is one big happy dream, fading into the credits, mission accomplished, happily ever after. Or not? It is?
On a gloomy California day, with the sea the color of despair and a wall of ominous gray cloud blocking the sun, the Duchess of Sussex relaunched on Instagram after a seven-year hiatus.
There could be no greater sign that the gloves had been taken off, that something big was about to be revealed and that the ties of decorum and tattered majesty of the past were all but forgotten: in 2025, the former Meghan Markle will launch herself as a modern woman. media star and cooking guru on all media platforms, or die trying.
The 28-second film was supposedly filmed by Prince Harry, another Instagram-captive husband forced to win over grandma for an ambitious wife. What was she thinking as Megs skipped around the beach like a giddy little girl, writing 2025 in the sand with what appeared to be some sort of calligraphy-level finger stick instrument? Surely even he must wonder where all this is leading.
I’ll tell you where it’s headed. Straight to the celebrity kitchen. The Sussexes’ surprise Insta post announced a sneak peek of the duchess’ long-awaited Netflix lifestyle show, called With Love, Meghan. The eight-part series launches on January 15 and features you-know-who in a linen apron spreading joy through food and flowers, and I’m here for it.
Does California dream? Meghan’s new Instagram video filmed on a shady beach
The 28-second film was supposedly filmed by Prince Harry, another Insta-captive husband forced to steal from grandma for an ambitious wife, writes Jan Moir.
The trailer shows Meghan performing the usual cooking show clichés – chopping onions, preparing a raspberry, harvesting honey from her own hives – but she’s clearly so excited about herself that her delight is almost contagious. Almost.
“This is probably one of the most glamorous moments of my life,” says producer and actress Mindy Kaling when Meghan serves her a slice of Victoria sponge cake.
The domestic duchess took this compliment in stride. “I’ve always loved taking something pretty ordinary and elevating it,” she said, but for once she wasn’t talking about her stupid husband.
He also promised viewers that he would share some “little tips and tricks” and revealed that he liked to “surprise people with moments that let them know he was really thinking about them.” My mind instantly turned to the Windsors, their faces melting in horror as they watched Oprah Winfrey’s infamous 2021 interview.
“We’re not looking for perfection, we’re looking for joy,” Meghan says elsewhere. I love your use of the royal ‘we’, but if ‘we’ don’t pursue culinary excellence, then what’s the point? “Love is in the details,” he insists. It certainly is.
In relaunching her Insta account this week, Meghan must have forgotten that it’s barely been three months since Harry lavishly immersed himself in his own self-importance, warning an audience at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York about the “widespread threat that our world poses for us, especially our children,” and talking about “incredibly powerful social media companies.”
Harry is so used to privilege giving him a free pass that he fails to see the void in both his words and his position. He’s a useful idiot for many half-assed Wokist causes, but even worse than that, he’s also a hypocrite.
For now we must assume that he thinks this same insane power is absolutely fine if it can be harnessed in a way beneficial to the House of Sussex. What is Instagram if not simply an online marketing mecca, a platform for bragging rights, a stall of self in the big, oily Bazaar of Me?
The trailer shows Meghan performing the usual cooking show clichés: chopping onions, growing a raspberry and harvesting honey from her own hives.
Here’s your wife, launching into frothy online surfing like any other hopeful hopeful, connecting her shows and herself along with the Kardashians and the criminals, the famous and the trash.
However, to be fair to Meghan, there are other quasi-royal Insta accounts out there, all of them equally selfish. For starters, there’s Fergie’s stream of confusing madness (“Let’s blow bubbles of joy and really embrace love”).
But while the Duchess of Sussex isn’t the only one wallowing in the whiny brine of royal publicity, I think at least the Prince and Princess of Wales have an excuse for their indulgence.
To be honest, their Hovis ad-style posts with the family dressed in matching vintage woolens make me want to vomit, but at least William and Kate understand that they have a duty to a British public that is committed to monarchy and, therefore, with George. , Carlota and Luis.
By contrast, the Sussexes keep their children hidden (understandably), but assiduously promote all their commercial progeny. And Meghan is not promoting the line of succession, she is promoting a cooking show on a streaming platform for her own financial and professional benefit. There is a difference.
Is it too little too late? The Duchess is now a 40-something mother of two, an aspiring entrepreneur who should know better than to put herself on Instagram and Netflix. However, perhaps the truth is that you are running out of options.
Five years after the Sussexes left the UK to start their new life in America, the Duchess of Sussex has yet to successfully hitch her moth-eaten old donkey of royal fame onto a shiny bandwagon of Hollywood-style success.
Despite her best efforts in the spheres of podcasting, radio broadcasting, charity, and influencers, she’s no Gwyneth, she’s no Michelle O, she’s no Martha, and she’s no Reese. She is nowhere.
And with each passing year, her chances of monetizing her waning status as duchess are on a sliding scale from barely possible to zero. With Love, Meghan is her last chance to make it big.
You can buy your own flowers, write 2025 in the sand, talk to yourself for hours, but is the writing on the wall already? Behind Meghan and Harry’s big California adventure and this latest culinary adventure are a lot of dead ends: the stuttering efforts that have characterized their post-Megxit life to date.
All that big talk about Archewell changing the world, about finding a cure for Covid, building ‘meaningful initiatives’ and ‘driving long-term change’ on the world stage? How ridiculous it all sounds now, little more than talk and boasting, even if well-intentioned.
And here’s Meghan, where she started in the second celebrity division, collecting likes and ticks as an Instagram influencer and making soups and cakes for her friends on a 30-minute-per-episode TV show.
Only now he is giving up a royal title that he has little moral right to use and that was bequeathed to him by a family he has repeatedly and publicly disparaged. No matter how you look at it, it’s not very appetizing.