Does anyone care about Harry and Meghan?

[Hekate]

34. They live up US 101 in a community where it is normal to want a quiet life for your children...

…. and also normal to be wealthy and well-known. Montecito’s the kind of place where you can go to Starbuck’s or the grocery store and not have tourists bug you. You’re not a freak, in other words. It’s a casual coastal location with access to a nice public beach. I have read that a clutch of Hollywood people have decided the commute is worth it in order to raise their kids away from Beverly Hills, Hollywood, and LA.

Oh, for those who don’t know — it’s not some kind of gated community, but an actual unincorporated town in Santa Barbara County. Lots of trees hiding the houses. In my former politically active life, my work took me there many times for meetings, because some of the residents like to raise money for Democrats and liberal causes. You just have to have a lot of spare cash to by a home there.

Exit Montecito and enter nearby Santa Barbara and there’s a lot more to do in the way of cultural life, but it is far from being Los Angeles and the folks like it that way. There are certainly a lot of tourists, but the locals will leave you alone. There is less privacy.

I don’t think Meghan and Harry are trying to act like a famous couple — they are a famous couple. If they had wanted a glitzy life they would have stayed in Los Angeles and its many ostentatious enclaves.

I don’t read supermarket tabloids, because they are trash and garbage. I don’t think anyone in their right mind wants to be written up by those things.

I have no idea about the “average American” not caring about them. Maybe we all have other things to occupy our minds. When I think about them at all, I wish them well. Last I heard they were still building charitable trusts as a way to do good, and working out how to make a living for themselves. For that — they really do need to give the media access.

The beach snapshots I’ve seen, the Christmas photos and all, they just look like normal Southern Californians in the sunshine. They look as far away from those formal Royal portraits as it is possible to get. If they can repair family relationships, all to the good. But Harry knows all to well what can happen to a woman who doesn’t fit in, and who is being relentlessly attacked by the tabloid press.