Maybe We Didn’t Learn Anything At All…

I want you to take a moment to look at this video: Hilarious moment from Harry and Meghan’s Bondi visit you totally missed

So, in it we see Prince Harry and Meghan Markle turn up at Bondi with the full travelling circus - cameras, crowds, security, and that very deliberate sense that this is meant to be a “moment.”

And right in the middle of it, someone just stays on her towel.

She doesn’t move. She doesn’t look impressed. She doesn’t even glance up properly. She keeps reading, keeps sunbaking, keeps studying; and carries on like a royal visit is about as important as a passing seagull.

It’s funny, because it’s so completely unbothered. There’s no statement in it. No attitude. Just someone quietly deciding that whatever is happening five metres away is not worth interrupting a perfectly tan.

And honestly, fair enough.

You can bring global attention, media crews, and a carefully managed narrative to Bondi Beach, but you’re still competing with someone who has just put sunscreen on and isn’t about to restart the whole process for anyone.

That’s Bondi.

But once you get past the humour, the rest of the scene starts to look a bit different. Because while one person opted out, everyone else leaned in. Phones came out, people gathered, the usual orbit formed - watching, filming, following, as if this was something they were entitled to see up close.

That part feels familiar. Not in a good way.

Because we’ve seen what that kind of attention does. We saw it with Princess Diana - the constant presence, the lack of space, the sense that someone’s life becomes public property simply because people want access to it.

Everyone said afterward that it went too far.

And yet, here we are again. Different time, better cameras, faster coverage, but the same underlying behaviour. The same quiet assumption that if someone is visible, they’re available.

Harry has been pretty clear about what that looks like from the inside. He watched it happen to his mother and has spent most of his adult life trying to step away from it. The strange part is that stepping away doesn’t seem to reduce the attention. If anything, it sharpens it.

It becomes more focused. More curious. More persistent.

Which makes that woman on the towel even more interesting.

She didn’t protest. She didn’t make a point. She just didn’t participate. And in doing that, she stripped the whole thing back to what it actually was — two people walking along a beach, surrounded by a lot of noise that only exists because people keep feeding it.

That’s the part we don’t really talk about. People feeding it.

I didn’t buy a magazine again after Dianna’s death. Oh, I know that the publishers wouldn’t have cared less. But I figured if there were thousands of us, all over the world, our protest would be heard.

And that’s what this woman did. Let them hear, and the world go on.

We like to say we learned something from Diana. That the line was crossed. That the pressure was too much. That we wouldn’t do that again. But Harry; he is in the paper every day. Usually scathing about him or his wife Megan. For him, the attention hasn’t gone away. It’s just become more constant, more casual, more normalised.

And maybe the most honest moment from that Bondi visit wasn’t the coverage, or the crowds, or the carefully framed photos. It was the person who didn’t move. Because for a second, everything dropped away, and what was left didn’t look important at all.

It just looked like people on a beach.

And maybe that’s how it should be.