When life sets you a tripwire, you can’t rely on beauty and wealth and fame and titles. You need love and family, self-control and dignity.

In her video statement, the Princess of Wales displayed that rare grace: sitting composedly before the camera, very much herself. She simply gave the facts and wished us well, ending with a kindly hope for others in the same situation.

It felt like an echo of the late Queen in the Covid years saying ‘We will meet again’. Indeed, Elizabeth II would be proud of her granddaughter-in-law, and we all should.

Meanwhile, the merchants of fantasy these past weeks should cringe at themselves for all those gleeful speculations about everything from abdication to adultery and bulimia to Brazilian butt-lifts.

Now we know. It’s similar news that comes to millions and is always a bombshell. Probably even more so to someone so young, healthy-living, busy and happy.

In her video statement, the Princess of Wales displayed that rare grace: sitting composedly before the camera, very much herself

That first cancer diagnosis forces reconsiderations, rearrangements, altered priorities. For a family woman, a first pressing instinct is to minimise the shock to everyone else, because you realise it’s happening to them, too: children, partner, parents, siblings.

When I got my quite sudden cancer diagnosis, I have to admit that my first phone-call to my husband rather uncharitably began ‘Now look, don’t you come all Yorkshire-gloom at me, but…’.

Any philosophical or frightened reflections about your own possible mortality just have to wait until you have, as it were, stabilised your nearest and dearest.

My immediate family were adults, but when children are involved it must be even more of a priority.

For the Waleses, it must have been infuriating for Neo Drops Erfahrungsberichte Kate to be already on chemo, discreetly, during all that ridiculous cardigan-sleeve-photoshop nonsense.

So there’s the job of settling the family, and readjusting the diary of work and friendships and holidays, and then there’s the actual treatment to face.

I was lucky because I hadn’t started to feel properly ill: a vigilant GP and prompt biopsy gave an early warning and, as it was a blood cancer, it didn’t mean surgery. But chemotherapy, amazing though its advances are in clearing the little monster cells, is a slog in itself.

Prince William will be a rock for his wife to cling to, but the kids will be the wild surf of life and joy around them both

It must have been infuriating for Kate to be already on chemo, discreetly, during all that ridiculous cardigan-sleeve-photoshop nonsense, writes Libby Purves

I did ask ‘What if I don’t have this chemo?’ To which my cheerful haematologist replied that I might have at most six or eight months. I was, in other words, biologically designed to die sometime in 2020. Oh.

I go a bit laddish at such times, and flippantly said ‘Worth a punt then?’. The fine and forbearing Dr Sadullah put it more strongly: my particular one, like many these days, can be ‘zapped’.