It’s nice to know that people are thinking of you when you are sick.
But as any invalid will know, there comes a point when the endless well-wishes can become a tad oppressive. So your sympathy, please, for King Charles and Princess Kate whose offices responded to a staggering 27,000 written messages of good wishes following their cancer diagnoses.
To put that in some kind of context, Chat GPT reckons that were 27,000 standard-sized envelopes laid end to end, they would stretch around Buckingham Palace 14.5 times.
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A courtier told The Daily Beast that Kate and Charles had not been able to sign all the replies to their cards and letters personally, as they usually like to do.
The 27,000 number was divulged in the otherwise somewhat dry pages of the royals’ annual financial report. They pride themselves on being thrifty people, you see, and postage adds up.
Elsewhere, the annual report, which was published just after midnight on Wednesday morning local time in the U.K., boasted that the royals had kept their annual expenditure steady for three years in the face of inflationary pressures, spending £86.3 million ($111 million), before counting £34.5 million ($44.5 million) spent on the ongoing 10-year renovation of Buckingham Palace—which is now into its eighth year and has resulted in, amongst other things, a new lavatory block being constructed at the Palace.
Charles’ aim to be a green king also appears to be bearing fruit, with courtiers talking up a 3 percent decrease in natural gas and heating emissions across the occupied royal palaces, and the installation of solar panels at Windsor Castle for the first time.
The report also noted greater diversity among the royal household, with ethnic minority staff now making up 11.4 percent of the workforce, up on last year’s 9.7 percent but still some way short of the 14 percent goal.
