The news arrives with the clinical efficiency of a ventilator: Norway’s Crown Princess Mette-Marit awaits a lung transplant. And who is rushing to her aid? The ever-obliging British medical establishment.
How terribly Victorian of us. The Norwegian royals, stripped of real power but draped in ceremonial oxygen, now rely on the beneficence of a foreign health service. It is a tale of two nations: one that sold its soul to oil, the other that sold its soul to the National Health Service.
And the princess, suspended between them, becomes a symbol of our age. We have conquered nature through transplantation, yet we remain slaves to biology. The wait is a purgatory, a limbo of hope and decay.
It is the modern condition writ small. And the British hospitals, ever eager to play the role of Whitehall’s missionary, extend their stethoscopes across the North Sea. But what of the common Norwegian?
What of the British patient? They wait too, but without the diplomatic cables and royal press releases. The crown princess is a reminder: in a world of inequality, even breath is a privilege.
And as we hold our own breath for her recovery, we should perhaps consider the decadence of a society that must turn to royalty for a story of life and death. The Fall of Rome began with such diversions. The circus, the games, the royal ailments.
And while the empire crumbles, we marvel at the machinery of life support.
