Tom Parker Bowles: King Charles ‘genuinely is the loveliest man in the world’

Tom Parker Bowles is promoting his cookbook/history book, Cooking & The Crown. He was granted access to the palace archives and researched what kind of food was served to various British kings and queens. TPB’s background and job is all about food – he’s a food writer and he’s acted as a “judge” on cooking shows too. I get the feeling that he doesn’t make much money from his career, but he manages to get by because, you know, his mother is the queen consort, and King Charles prefers Camilla’s children to his own. Anyway, TPB wrote a “My Saturday” piece in the Telegraph – it’s a series where mildly famous people describe their average Saturdays. Tom’s piece is a lot about food and alcohol, but he mentioned his mother and stepfather a few times.

He lives at his girlfriend’s house: “As I get older, Saturdays become more and more sacred. Sundays are near to Monday, but Saturdays are full of promise. I’m currently living with my girlfriend in her place in north Kensington, so the first thing I do is let out her whippet, Marvin, and my Jack Russell, Maud.

He takes supplements: “While my girlfriend’s lying in, which I’ve lost the ability to do, I’ll go downstairs and make some fresh coffee, with which I’ll wash down endless middle-age-battling supplements, including Berocca, good bacteria pills for my gut, vitamin D and a mushroom supplement. I’ve no idea if they’re working but I’ve not been ill for a few years, so I like to think so.

Reformer Pilates: “I have a job which involves eating for a living, so for the last three years I’ve been going to reformer Pilates. I’m the oldest man there – everyone else is 20 years younger and has a body like a Greek god or goddess. If I didn’t go, I’d just be too fat and indolent.

A “raw prawn” lunch: “After Pilates I feel like I’ve earned myself a fat lunch, so we’ll often go to a brilliant local Thai restaurant by Wormwood Scrubs called Fitou’s, where I’ll have blisteringly hot, non-farang raw prawns with garlic and chilli, with a bottle of wine.

Whether he visits his mother on Saturdays: “I know some people might visit their family for a bite to eat on a Saturday, but I don’t tend to nip down for lunch at Buckingham Palace and Clarence House as my mother is usually in the country at weekends now. I’m more likely to see her and Charles in the week, and when I do visit, I have a special high-security card that grants me access. And no, she doesn’t leave a spare key under a flowerpot. I know the palace policemen well, as do my kids, so I just flash the card and they let us in, and we go and say hi and have a cup of tea, and for the kids that’s entirely normal. If I don’t know whether my mother is in or not, I usually find out just by reading the paper and realising, ‘Oh, she’s on a royal tour this weekend.’ Charles, who genuinely is the loveliest man in the world, and I’m not just being oily, knows so much about food and loves his food, as does my mother.

Dinner at home: “We’ll sit down to eat and have another bottle of wine. Sadly, asking my mother if her and Charles fancy joining us to polish off a rib of beef isn’t really a possibility. They’ve got amazing chefs so why would they bother coming here? But I’m sure if I asked and booked it far enough ahead in the diary, they might come.

[From The Telegraph]

I cannot imagine choosing to eat raw prawns. Prawns and shrimp take like two seconds to cook, for goodness sake. It also sounds like Tom spends most of his Saturday in a boozy haze. His mother is probably the same – he comes by it naturally. As for all of the stuff about Charles being “the loveliest man in the world”… I’m sort of fascinated by the fact that Charles has always been so much warmer and nicer to his stepchildren than his actual children. Is it just about his hatred for Diana, and by extension, his hatred for her sons? I don’t doubt that Tom’s relationship with Charles is probably a lot better than Charles’s relationships with Harry and William. I just don’t think that makes Charles “the loveliest man in the world.” It just means that Tom is hawking a book with royal approval, and the monarchy and media aren’t going to say one word about how tacky this is.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.