So many people claim to love William. But do they really? What is the right thing to be calling for? Should we continue to fuss about the horror he has gone through or be ready for him to continue what royal duties (or however you call them) he seems to have been roped into?

Is it love for William to treat him as this fragile thing who is obviously grieving as much as X person ever was, given that X person lost their mother when they were fifteen too and obviously knows how he feels? Is that not placing a burden on William that is completely unfair? To be somebody else's grieving template?

Is that not different from looking to him and to other royals to help set an example for grieving? You cannot take over somebody else's life. We cannot expect (even subconsciously) William to take over our lives or be there for us. We also cannot expect to take over his. We have to let him be who he is. I think that is the most important task ahead of us as royalwatchers and potential royalists.

How can we allow William to be a human being if we do not even know who he is? Take this book that's about to be published. I was very angry about it when I heard. Given that you really need more than publicity excerpts to judge, still, that sounded pretty bad. Some kid at Eton telling their uncle, who published the book? So William is crying out for his mother at night? Well, either this info came from the boy in the room next door or I'm not believing it. William has been mythologized so badly these last few months that it would be easy for rumors like that to get started. William is determined to get down to the bottom of what happened to his mother? Well, without words or voice intonation to judge by, that could have been a half-hysterical declaration or a calm utterance barely caught except by a couple. We may never know. Beware. Tales take on great coinage in a school such as that, where rumors are passed on from hand to hand and often wind up even bigger at the end of a residence hall than they were at the entrance. I've seen it. I was a dorm mother myself. Especially where money is involved. Especially where someone sees a child as vulnerable. Especially where people want to hear stories.

How do we even know that was William crying out? Maybe the kid across the hall sounds just like him......

But on the other hand, I'm the one who has the essay where I point to the possibility that William has been posting on the Net, my belief that I may have found him, and some ideas as to how to catch him. I don't hand you a road map. But I do hand you some ideas (as I do all through this site) on how to identify his language use. Should I have done this? What if he just wants a breather? I'll admit it was a gut feeling. But I posted that essay and haven't seen reason to take it down since. I guess the reason is that I reveal no information about him -- heck, what I know of "this person" gives me no conclusive, "Hi, I'm William, Granny says Hi and the dog sends a friendly bark" type stuff. And what I tell you to look at will simply give you a better idea of who royals are in general, as much as we can look into their world. I may be wrong. I make no claims to being right. And, I have looked at it this way -- anything that may potentially send teenage girls surfing through C-SPAN cannot be an entirely bad thing. I have no documentation that this is William. He could vanish easily (and I say to this person, that if you are William and you choose to vanish, if I find you again, I will not breathe a word -- I will take that as your decision). And I have seen a couple of things that tell me that William may not be real unhappy about a little, just a little bit of attention here and there as this person. Again, I'm analyzing off just a little information. I'm just doing the best I can, Buck House. And if anyone else catches him, all I can say is you deserve it. This guy's hard to catch, apparently.

Maybe the best we can all do is let William himself make the decision. He's a human being, even if we cannot document the fact to our satisfaction by all kinds of "info" that proves it to us. (And I have seen utter monsters and evil people devour McDonald's hamburgers, so there.) Let's let him be himself.

And, Your Royal Brattiness, if I see the first sign from you that you want mention of this deleted from my site, it's gone. Your call. If indeed that's who you are.

I may be being taken for a ride here. I may just want to see William out on the Net.

But isn't that true of all of us? Isn't that what royalty's about?

As a friend of mine said, that's their job. That's just plain their job.

Let's let this young man get on with what he deems his job to be, shall we?

That is probably the best we can do.

Carry on, laddie! Whether you speak to us from isolated castle towers only, through the pages of a book (heaven forfend, at least that one), or on the Net itself. Carry on!

And cheers to yer granny and whoever else needs it over there. Sounds like it's getting drastic.