Princess Anne talks about her head injury & how retirement ‘isn’t really an option’

Last June, Princess Anne had a very serious injury on her estate, Gatcombe Park. Over the months, we’ve pieced together some of the story – Anne was outside alone, and she got a severe head injury somehow, possibly horse-related, and someone in her family found her unconscious in a field. She ended up being hospitalized for the better part of a week. She had a very serious concussion, and she has complete memory loss around what happened to her. If you ask me, Anne probably had the most serious and life-altering medical situation in the family in 2024, but no one treated it that way and she was expected to just carry on and lift the dead weight of her lazy grifter family before her bruises even healed. Last week, Anne was in South Africa for two days- without her husband, who got injured right before he was supposed to go with her – and she ended up speaking to the media while she was down there.

During her two-day tour of South Africa, Princess Anne opened up about the frightening incident last summer that left her with a concussion. The Princess Royal, 74, said that she had no memory and recalled “nothing” of the accident that left her hospitalized for five days, believed to be caused by an impact with a horse on her Gatcombe Park estate. The accident taught her that “every day is a bonus, really,” according to the BBC.

After the royal was injured last June, her medical team described her injuries as being consistent with an impact from a horse’s head or legs. When asked whether the last thing she remembered was walking into a field, Anne said, ‘No, I don’t even remember that. I know where I thought I was going, and that was to go to the chickens, no, nothing to do with horses,” Princess Anne said about the incident. Seeing the chickens was “my regular visit,” she added. “I don’t have any idea what I was doing in the field, because I never normally went that way.”

“It just reminds you, shows you — you never quite know, something [happens] and you might not recover,” she continued.

“You’re jolly lucky … if you can continue to be more or less compos mentis [of sound mind], and last summer I was very close to not being,” Princess Anne added. “Take each day as it comes, they say.”

When asked if she planned to retire anytime soon, the longtime hardest working member of the royal family said that retirement “isn’t really an option.”

“I don’t think there’s a retirement program on this particular life,” the Princess Royal added.

When asked if she’d suffered any long-term damage from the incident seven months ago, Princess Anne joked, “Apparently not — at least I don’t think so. As far as I know, nobody else thinks so — they haven’t been honest enough to tell me yet. So far, so good,” she added.

[From People]

This genuinely made me sad: “I don’t think there’s a retirement program on this particular life.” It’s true. They made the poor 88-year-old Duke of Kent hobble around repeatedly last year, and they call him “semi-retired” or something. What Anne needs is a real rest and recuperation from a traumatic head injury – but instead, they forced her out for events before her bruises even healed. If you ask me, the head injury changed Anne. I mean, I don’t know the woman and I’m only judging her from her public statements, but it seems like the injury took away Anne’s sharpness in a way. She just seems so vulnerable in a way she never used to sound before. I can’t imagine having no memory of the incident either – and to not even know why she was in the field? Yikes.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.