Their dullness and lack of glamour may yet work to the public advantage of the middle-aged English couple who announced this week that they will marry on April 8th, writes Maeve Binchy in London
The news programme announces the engagement in the little mini-market where people are doing their morning shopping. The younger people ignore it, as they continue to root around looking for extra complimentary CDs among the magazines or to lick bits of frozen yogurt from the outside of the cartons . . .
The older people are more interested.
"That will be a relief to her majesty," says the woman with a basket full of lentils for herself and choice cuts for her cat. "Her poor majesty was exhausted trying to turn the other way; now it will all be above board."
"A lot of bloody nonsense," says the man in the cloth cap with the north of England accent, who buys tins of pilchards and oven chips and nothing else. "Pair of them were perfectly all right living over the brush like half the country; he's only marrying her because they're asking questions about how much of our money he spends on her anyway."
And the large comfortable woman who sits like a wise old bird at the checkout is very pleased.
"It's one up for the cardigans," she says. "I knew the day would come when a woman as shabby as myself would marry a prince."
I lived here in these London streets in 1981 when Charles was getting married for the first time, and the atmosphere was electric. The playboy prince was going to settle down, and he had found a nice virgin girl to marry.
Yet, at his engagement press conference, when asked was he in love, he had said rather ominously: "Yes, whatever that means."
But the country had gone mad with an innocent pleasure. It was July 1981, and there was a huge fireworks display in Hyde Park the night before the wedding. There were street parties, and I was almost afraid to tell people I was talking to on the tube to St Paul's that I had an invitation to the do in my handbag. They might have killed for it. And I say "the people that I talked to" because for a day or two London forgot its introversion and everyone spoke to everyone else. It was like the day the Pope had come to Dublin two years previously.
It was something that was of its time and will never happen in the same way again. There's no excitement about Charles and Camilla in the streets of west London this time around. No spontaneous flags and bunting, no lump in the throat empathising with the happy event.
The past 24 years have seen too much murky water flow under too many bridges. The little virgin bride shed all her shyness and puppy fat and became one of the world's most beautiful women, and Charles, who had never loved her remotely, behaved as badly as any pantomime villain. The disastrous royal marriage was lived out in public, with other parties briefing the media about the rights and wrongs of the situation. The couple's two little boys struggled on, surrounded by butlers, nannies and non-speaking relatives.
Princess Diana, who at one stage held all the cards because she was nice to people and full of charm, lost out in the end in every possible way. Charles, who became more arrogant and mutinous with every passing year, made little attempt to hide his relationship and now seems, oddly, to have won. It looks now as if he is being rewarded: he is getting the marriage he should have had 35 years ago when Camilla was certainly up for it but when he dithered and couldn't make a decision.
It's not a love story that immediately sets the bells ringing or promises to get to the heart of the nation. But never underestimate the power of the media.
About 20 minutes after the usual messed-up announcement from Clarence House, a statement that left so many questions unanswered and showed a complete lack of planning and preparation, all the television channels had wheeled in the ageing royal-watchers. They were brought out of mothballs and dusted down and wound up to go. I know what I'm talking about; I was one of them.
Queen Elizabeth II has four children. I was at three of their weddings and I didn't bring any of them much luck. Only Prince Edward's first marriage has survived, and Princess Anne's second marriage.
I am sure Charles and Camilla, who have had each other out on approval for some time, will make a go of it. And truly, most people of goodwill will wish them happiness, as you would to anyone who has had a troubled journey in romance.
But it's such a different scene this time around. I wonder whether Charles, in his very narrow world, knows this.
It's hard for any of us to know what other people think and how they live and what their values are. But it must be harder for the Prince of Wales, surrounded as he is by sycophants and by people who grew up in the same strange enclosed world as himself, where journalists are called "reptiles" and where there are the People Who Matter and then the rest of the world, which doesn't matter a bit. He must think he is a scream, because I have seen the awful, fawning, servile press, really worse than reptiles, laughing hysterically if he makes a stupid joke. Why would be not think that his forthcoming wedding should be on the same scale as the last one. He has no loving family to lean on.
His parents never went to visit him when he was at that terrible school, Gordonstoun. Do you know anyone who was never visited at boarding school by their parents? He was completely out of touch with the life his first bride wanted to live, and there was nobody to advise him, except in the ways of protocol, history and tradition, which could be summed up as "wives must learn". He was singularly unlucky in that his wife never did.
His polo-playing friends told him that Diana was a loony tune and that his best bet was to invite Camilla to their house-parties. Then, somewhere along the line, somebody taped his intimate conversation with Camilla years ago and broadcast it to the world. That was the only day I felt really sorry for Charles. I could have wept for his sheer embarrassment as I saw him on television straightening his cuffs and going to see his mother, who was after all the queen of the country that was rocking to his bizarre sexual fantasies. Strange as they were, they were his and Camilla's own business.
So the man who will presumably one day be king may not have a clue how his future subjects think of him and his wedding.
For a start, most of the broadcasts and breaking news and interviews focused on the issue of what poor Camilla would be called. She would not dare to call herself princess of Wales, would she? She couldn't ever be queen, could she? And eventually, two hours later, Charles's expensive spin doctors and PR people issued a statement defining what the woman would or would not be called.
Then there were hours of debate about whether a civil ceremony would be a proper marriage for a head of the church, or whether a church wedding would be worse. Then they debated whether Charles was only marrying Camilla now because the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee might uncover something too damaging about what he had spent on the lady. Or because the results of the second inquest into Princess Diana's death were to be published, possibly throwing up even more bad publicity about the royal family. Or because the Archbishop of Canterbury said that they should regularise their situation.
And as if all this wasn't bad enough for a couple planning their wedding, it was said that the Labour party was incandescent with rage because Charles and Camilla's plans were messing up the timing of the next election.
I am basically a big custard-heart. I don't know these people at all. I've watched them for three decades, notebook in hand, but I don't know them or know anybody who knows them.
But I am interested in their love story.
I think Charles is arrogant and selfish, but the roots of that lie in his upbringing.
I think Camilla is basically a decent and horsey cardigan who loves Charles and is prepared to go through all this (like she has gone through so much already) from the sheer accident of falling in love with him. And really, I don't think she cares what she is called. She isn't even trying to be "queen of hearts", and it must be painful and hurtful when she is compared to her beautiful, warm, but deeply unhappy predecessor.
The young have no interest in the affairs and doings of such elderly people.
The Diana activists may feel that somehow Camilla triumphed in the end, and perhaps they will dislike her for that.
I can't be the only person in the world who doesn't think hereditary monarchy is a good idea but who still does genuinely wish these two confused middle-aged people a great wedding day and a good time together.