He loves eggs and trees and drives his Aston Martin with cheese. Photo Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images
I’m not British, but reading the British news ahead of King Charles’ coronation, I get the feeling that the nation could be more excited for its new king. A gray cloud of apathy hangs over what is usually a once-in-a-lifetime event, with an estimated 64 per cent of Brits saying they either “don’t care at all” or “not much” about Saturday’s main event. Aside from the fervent supporters camped near the procession route in central London, some seem more excited about a bank holiday than a new sovereign. “With the Queen, she was fabulous and glamorous to some people,” a British publicist recently told Rolling Stone, but “Charles doesn’t add anything.” Personal? I’m not sure if that’s true. We’re talking about a complex and highly idiosyncratic guy who’s spent decades awaiting his hereditary promotion honing a series of quirks perhaps unmatched by any modern monarch. For example, did you know that the new king’s handwriting looks like lots of little spiders crawling across the page? That he only likes one kind of toilet paper and feeds his sports car with old cheese stuff? Would it help you care more about the coronation if you did?
Please read on for more fun facts about King Charles III.
Search for eggs. Photo: Getty Images/Getty Images
Charles’ alleged love of eggs has surfaced frequently in the weeks leading up to his coronation for choosing a quiche as his signature dish. Isn’t that pretty French? you scoff, even though quiche is of medieval German origin. For his part, Charles “loves anything with eggs and cheese,” according to a chef who claims for making him quiche “many times”. What other types of eggs does Charles like? he likes backed eggs and boiled eggs, and indeed it was rumored that he ordered his staff to boil him seven eggs every morning, from which he would pick the winner and fuck everyone else. According to NPR, the rumor was so damaging that Charles saw fit to address it on the royal website, insisting in the FAQ that he had never made such a claim “at breakfast or any other time.” But his former private chef, Mervyn Wycherley, has testified about the king’s allegedly specific cooking requirements: “His eggs had to be cooked for exactly four minutes. It was never anything but a four-minute egg. I always kept three pans boiling — just to be safe.” A former housekeeper has also claimed that after a day’s hunting, Charles sometimes invites the rest of the group over for an egg-and-whiskey party, which only a certified egg geek would do would.
A second reason Buckingham Palace is attempting to make Coronation Quiche a reality is that it is reminiscent of another great love of Charles’s: seasonal herbs and vegetables fresh from the garden. In this case we’re talking tarragon and spinach and fava beans, the latter of which you don’t often see in quiche. But sorry idiots, the coronation comes in the middle of broad bean season in the UK, and Charles’ diet is heavily weighted towards vegetables from his estate – so heavy that he’ll reportedly be shipping crates of produce some 600 miles to go with him to travel on royal tours instead of eating whatever is local. One of many ways in which this man is a bundle of contradictions.
Readers who get their news of Charles mostly from the cut may be wondering how we got so many paragraphs into his full biography without mentioning Tampongate, so allow me to correct it: As Queen Consort Camilla, not Charles’ wife, but his longtime lover, he once privately stated that he would accept reincarnation as a tampon if it meant he could “live inside.” [her] Pants” and be with her all the time. You could say that besides eggs and veggies, he’s also a freak for Camilla.
An important caveat to this last point is that at the time Tampongate took place, he was married to Princess Diana and had been unfaithful for many years. He went so far as to admit that a moment of honesty exploded in his face in a 1994 BBC interview. Diana also had affairs, but she hadn’t acknowledged them in a TV session – she was also widely popular. That’s probably the main reason why its popularity has remained so low for so long.
Soap operas, that is. At the National Television Awards in October, when he was already king, he gave a surprise salute to long-running drama Emmerdale. Significantly, I think he admitted to having watched the series since it was called Emmerdale Farm, which hasn’t been the case since 1989. According to Euronews, he’s also seen Poldark, a historical drama that I would still classify as a soap opera, and 2016’s The Night Manager, which I would classify as a high-budget soap opera starring Tom Hiddleston. Charles apparently liked it “very much”.
Are you already excited? Photo: Chris Jackson/Getty Images
One challenge Charles faces as king is keeping his thoughts to himself: monarchs shouldn’t voice their personal opinions or try to influence politics, but our guy seems to really enjoy doing both. According to Sally Bedell Smith, a biographer and acquaintance of Charles, he has an inquisitive and “broad mind,” a “talent as an accomplished diplomat,” an “independent spirit,” and a love of learning that make him well-known—everything, “very sensitive to violations of protocol” and dismissive of positions contrary to his own. There are probably not a few civil servants who could corroborate all of this: a long-standing practice of spamming senior ministers with his thoughts, criticisms and suggestions for their governance has earned him accusations of “lobbying at the highest levels of politics,” according to The Guardian a few years ago. Some of the causes Charles addressed: badger overpopulation; expanded availability of herbal medicines; better equipment for British forces in Iraq; the poor treatment of farmers by the supermarkets; the best design for new hospitals (he offered his own support).
Many of these notes went directly to then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, although Charles once wrote to Environment Secretary Elliot Morley to express his hope that “illegal fishing for Patagonian hake will be high on your list of priorities because until this trade is stopped.” , there is little hope for poor old albatross that I will continue to champion…”
The cache of letters revealing this interference was dubbed “Black Spider Memos” because of the king’s distinctive handwriting: thin, spindly, cramped handwriting.
See? Be crazy! Photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Or something Welsh; He is not fluent but took classes at Aberystwyth University before his inauguration as Prince of Wales in 1969. During this speech, and again in his speech to the Welsh Parliament shortly after becoming king, he made some statements in Welsh.
It’s called Poundbury, and it’s an odd soup of traditional architectural styles. But while some critics have dismissed the Dorset project as “feudal Disneyland” or a modern-day version of Marie Antoinette’s Hameau de la Reine in Trianon, it’s actually said to be quite a nice place to live, barring rigid rules. (No TV antennas, no satellite dishes, no painting your own home without His Majesty’s permission.)
Just that little bit about the UK as it is the sovereign’s privilege, but still.
Video proof:
This is what the biographer Christopher Andersen says, who explains: “He wants what he wants, when he wants it.” Royal expert Tina Brown, who claims to also have his two Scottish landscape paintings and an orthopedic bed when traveling, also reports on this peculiarity takes away To that list, Andersen adds Charles’ childhood teddy bear, a personal chef (Charles has denied this), and a special ice tray. All to say…
Exhibit A: Supposedly he needs the special ice cube tray because he can’t stand the “clinking of square cubes” and therefore needs a different, more melodious shape.
Exhibit B: He should also take his favorite soft plush toilet paper, which you can test drive here.
Also according to Andersen, Charles has a “volcanic temper” and is “very capable of getting angry”. Andersen attributes part of the king’s supposed disposition to his upbringing, with an “aloof” mother (she had a big job, to be fair) and a father who was “a bully” to him and “made him cry in front of others.” brought”. Whatever the source, his outbursts are well documented: Andersen writes that after accidentally dropping a cufflink down a drain, Charles once pulled the sink from the wall it was mounted on, and then his valet grabbed his throat in his anger. Andersen adds that Charles once threw a boot jack at Diana during an argument and narrowly missed her, while Brown claimed in The Diana Chronicles that Charles threw furniture out of the window during arguments with his late wife. All of that is hearsay, but then there are the more recent tantrums over faulty pens, both of which occurred in the early days of his reign and both were caught on video. He was mourning at the time, but excitement seems to be a pattern.
As early as the 1970s, Charles spoke about the dangers of pollution. He paid attention to things like sustainable farming and bees and conservation, ideas that were universally received as woo-woo. “At first everyone thought he was a cracker,” royal expert Penny Junor told The Washington Post in 2021. “He’s been saying these things for 50 years, but the world has caught up with Charles, hasn’t it? He’s certainly not a nutcase now.” In fact, he’s the owner of one of the largest and most successful organic food brands in the UK: Duchy Originals, sold exclusively at Waitrose. He has installed solar panels on several of the royal residences. He draws heavily on his garden when it comes to his own diet, which he describes as “climatic.” (He goes vegan a few days a week, preferring plant-based foods.) Still, he prefers to fly privately — even when making short trips within the UK, sometimes in the path of his principles.
Or more specifically, cheesy by-product: he’s converted his old Aston Martin to run on “surplus English white wine and whey from the cheese-making process,” biofuel that – as The Guardian reports – could actually “do more harm than good”. if it were widely adopted. But I don’t think we need to worry about that.
Photo: WPA Pool/Getty Images
The former according to the New York Times, which reports that Charles believes the music makes for a more soothing milking process. He’s also asked pop star Katy Perry to sing to his plants, in keeping with his habit of whispering sweet nothings to encourage their growth and shaking a limb. In fact, according to The Sun, its practices were “AUTHORIZED” by none other than Sir David Attenborough, whose BBC series The Green Planet appears to have shown that “we don’t care enough about plants,” according to Attenborough, and not nearly as much much like plants interact with each other. I don’t know. I did not see it.
According to courtiers and confirmed by his staff.
Last summer, it was revealed that Charles accepted three cash payments of one million euros each from Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, former Prime Minister of Qatar, on behalf of his charity. Personally, when I say ‘accepted’, I mean in bags: “Once the money was stuffed into plastic bags from Chelsea luxury grocery and department store Fortnum & Mason, which holds a royal charter from the prince,” the Daily Beast reported. “Another time the money was in a suitcase, and the third time in a traveling bag”, that is, in a traveling bag.
He is Charles Philip Arthur George Mountbatten-Windsor or King Charles III, By the Grace of God Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and her other realms and territories, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.
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