Goats, generally, are not timorous. Flighty, yes. Indiscriminate, in dietary terms, certainly. A goat with an appetite will eat grass, weeds, tiramisu, or knickers. Whatever’s handy. Without let, hindrance or remorse.
Edith Piaf’s song about not having regrets applies with bells on to goats. Male goats, in addition to dietary promiscuity, will lower their heads and go at you with their horns for no reason.
Goats, in short, have a lot going for them when it comes to mowing the lawn, but they’re not given to panic attacks.
With the exception of myotonic goats. If you haven’t yet come across these lads, you haven’t lived. They are of a nervous disposition, are myotonic goats.
Burst a balloon near them, shout at them, or suddenly clang the gate loudly, and it puts the heart crossways in them.
Once they’ve been scared, they, first of all, go rigid, then collapse, which is why they’re popularly known as the fainting goats. They faint in a particularly pleasing way, with their four legs stiffly up in the air.Â
It’s sudden. It’s startling. It doesn’t do them any harm, and it doesn’t last long. Quick syncope, fast recovery. Just Google “fainting goats” to confirm.
We’re looking at myotonic goats this Monday morning because of Prince Harry, who needs to search for a petting zoo in Montecito, where he lives, and go study them with a view to changing his coping behaviour when rattled.
Because, right now, it’s flawed, as evidenced by the most publicised car chase since OJ Simpson’s.
Harry seriously needs to turn himself off and reboot.
First of all, as a former military man, he might perhaps do some update training on predicting the behaviour of an enemy.
This is also the sort of training everybody appearing before an Oireachtas committee needs to do. Not that anybody appearing before an Oireachtas committee should regard members of that committee as enemies, but analysing their usual pattern of combat can help prevent ambush.Â
Ditto with paparazzi and Harry.
Harry and Meghan arrive at the charity event prior to the alleged car-chase incident on Tuesday, May 16, in New York. Picture: AP
The pattern of combat adopted by paparazzi in the US is to do whatever it takes to get a shot of the celeb that’s not the official shot.Â
Yeah, sure, Meghan in her golden shift dress with her hair piled over one shoulder, allowing her masterful prince to drag her along by the hand as they leave a feminist awards ceremony does make an appealing shot.
But the possibility of snapping a picture of the two disembarking outside the Manhattan home of some filthy rich famous person is even more appealing, and since Meghan and Harry know only filthy rich famous people these days, it’s safe to bet that’s the type putting them up on the sofa bed.
(Before anybody suggests we’re being unfair to the ducal pair, we will admit that they visit and encourage people who aren’t filthy rich at events proving their social consciences, although they screw with the narrative a bit by tending to get to these events by private jet.)
Nobody expects Meghan to do strategic military planning. Her chosen role is to turn up and smile, mostly adoringly at Himself, a bit like Nancy Reagan used to do with Ronnie.
But if Harry had his military wits about him, or if he had thought through the practical and immediate implications of his general concern with security/protection, he would have worked out that Plan A hadn’t a lot going for it.
It meant setting out for parts unknown at ten o’clock at night, thereby effectively inviting photographers to follow the convoy in which he and his wife planned to travel. An overnight stay in the presidential suite of one of Manhattan’s posh hotels would have caused no problem at all.
But, once that opportunity not to create an unnecessary crisis had been foregone, the couple faced the car chase sequence.
Which, to be honest, although the prince did his hyperbolic best to sell it, was not up there with Bullitt, The Italian Job — or even Smokey and the Bandit.
And it was at this point that Harry’s impulsivity kicked in. He and his wife, according to reports which have all the guaranteed validity conveyed by total anonymity on the part of the sources, spent the following few hours looking at social media to see what outrageously invasive shots had been acquired by the evil photographers.
The Sussexes arrive at the Commonwealth Service at Westminster Abbey in their final official engagement before they quit royal life.
In fairness, it could be argued that the photographers were confused, rather than evil, because of the weird driving of the couple’s chauffeur and the bizarre shift to a yellow cab in the middle of the saga.
Harry then did an Enron. Remember the Enron CEO? “This is a communications issue, get me my comms people.”
Harry (and Meghan, for all we know) sat down with his communications people and briefed them. Because of the statement that was subsequently issued, we can safely assume that he set out a scream-by-scream saga of cars going up on sidewalks (footpaths, to us) blocking streets, driving the wrong way and causing multiple near-misses.
It was at this point in the briefing that his publicity people had a choice.
It’s a choice that faces many PR people with a variety of non-royal clients: Craft a release in exciting, even emotive terms, or tell the client to get a grip.
The first choice is easier than the second, which requires the consultant to go through every claim made and demonstrate how little objective data supports that claim. It also carries the dread possibility that the client (famous, rich and royal in this case) will fire you and hire someone else.
It is unsurprising, then, that the statement thus crafted actually issued.
Unsurprising but unfortunate, because the cops were quietly sceptical about a two-hour car chase nobody seemed to have noticed and which, given the streetscape of Manhattan, was difficult to imagine ever happening.
The Sussexes are in the middle of dozens of lawsuits, and when you’re suing people right, left and centre, you’re enmeshed in judicial systems rooted in history and dealing with something that happened last year or the year before or even further back.
That combination of factors may have caused the couple to miss the sudden, absolute shift in media attitudes that’s happened on both sides of the Atlantic.
The golden period where Oprah reverently accepted their every assertion is over. Now, anything they say is parsed in the light of the possibility that they may be given to moany exaggeration.
Moany exaggeration was certainly in play, post car chase. But then Harry’s impulsivity kicked in again with him demanding the photographs taken by the snappers on the fateful night. The snappers replied that nobody (other than a king) could make such a demand.
All of which adds up to the reason Harry needs to learn myotonic goat behaviour.
Any time what he feels is an injustice bursts over him, he needs to fall over with his legs all stiff.
