It's the furtive shame that makes a boy a man

So am I the only man in London whose baby Princess Diana did not want to have? Like one of Bateman's misfits, I cower before the finger of derision – The Man Who Didn't Get The Call. A shame. I think I could have interested her in the criticism of FR Leavis. It might have been the saving of her. For myself, at any rate, I swallow the indignity and try looking on the bright side. At least she would not have been sending her butler off to buy my son pornography.

Ignore that last remark. I am pretending to a pudeur I do not feel. In fact my first response, on reading that one of Paul Burrell's duties was bringing home Men Only and the like for William, had more of surprise in it than horror. I'd always imagined that royals had their own pornography. Well-bred girls in unzipped jodhpurs falling off polo ponies. Debs curtseying in rubber wellingtons and tiaras and nothing else. And the Palace was surely full to bursting with photographs of bare-breasted Tongans and Tanganyikans, snapped by Philip on royal tours.

The point about pornography is that even at its most fantastical it must approximate to what's familiar. Readers' wives must look like readers' wives. So where would be the point in our future king getting off on commoners disporting themselves commonly? All that inelegance of limb. All that bad skin.

Unless that was Diana's plan, the people's princess peddling the people's filth to democratise the monarchy and bring it down. No wonder they had to get rid of her.

As for the morality of it, parent to child, I am not sure. At one level it showed great emotional maturity. Not every mother is able to accept the sink of iniquity which is her son. Great consideration, too, since she understood that William couldn't be popping into WH Smith himself every time the fires of his young manhood needed stoking. And tact. She didn't involve herself, but got the butler to do it, man to man.

She seemed to learn from what she saw, Diana. And she was better placed than most women to observe how sexual reticence in the boy breeds catatonia in the man. In a trance, they seemed, those guardsmen of hers. Unawakened, like so many sleeping beauties. So in her own way she was a pioneer of mental health among the aristocracy.

But there was one aspect of the mental life of boys and men she didn't understand. The imperative to be furtive. Only think of what William missed out on by having Burrell deliver him his daily fix on the crested breakfast tray, along with the boiled eggs and soldiers, the Coco-Pops and the malted milk. No listening to the libido as it shapes its promptings, no mustering of the forces of resistance, no argument between the Jekyll and the Hyde of one's sexual nature, which argument Jekyll will always lose, but only after the libido has flooded the whole system with those chemicals to which we give the simple name of desire, but which in fact also encompass self-loathing and self-destruction and insanity.

Merely to accede mentally, merely to acknowledge that you will shortly do what you know you should not do, and scarf your face, and flee the house, and scour the streets for familiar faces to avoid, and push open the door of the newsagent whose bell rings louder than the plague-bell – Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead! – merely to be thus embarked, reader, on the ethical maybe-I-will, maybe-I-won't of porno purchase, all this Diana denied her boys.

And then the scrutiny. The newsagent eyeballing you, you eyeballing the newsagent. And the other customers, fellow ethical maybe-I-willers perhaps, people of weak character like yourself, who therefore know your secret (and it is no consolation whatsoever that you in turn know theirs, for your shame is unique and indivisible) and who therefore resent you because they know how long you are going to take before you actually approach the shelf you're blocking, how long you'll be pretending it's Yachting News or MacWorld you're interested in, until your hand accidentally knocks Bestiality for Boys off the top shelf and you think, oh well, in that case, since it's found me, and I won't be yachting this weekend anyway and I don't own a Mac, oh well, all right, why not – always provided the newsagent has a padded bag with steel-locks to pop it into, though not so unobtrusively as to be obtrusive, just casually, like burying a dead body, but without a priest, while looking at you and yet not looking at you, and having regard to your complete indifference to change, although it's true that the expenditure is part of the illogicality, part of the reason you do it, because it's all to prove you are somehow engaged in hostilities against your own best interests.

As for getting the stuff home, it's the identical procedure only in reverse, though you must add the fact of your parents being awake now – for the above was of course a dawn raid, while ordinary humanity slept – which immediate logistical difficulty is nothing compared to the long-term problems associated with storage. Do not ever, reader, discount storage. Once porno enters a boy's bedroom we are in Edgar Allan Poe territory, where the bloody truth will always out, where dismembered corpses announce their whereabouts to the suspicious, and lewd material beats louder, no matter where you conceal it, than a torn-out heart.

And it is degradation on such a scale that I would wish Diana to have gifted her sons? Yes, absolutely. For it is in this forge of demoralisation that our characters are hammered out. What tolerance of the weakness of others we finally possess, we owe to this. What sense of our own ridiculousness, and what affection we bear to women, in pursuit of whose distorted image we have shamed ourselves so contemptibly. Thus does mortification make a man of us at last.

Poor William, missing out on that.