Celebrate the Royal Baby With Barf Bags and £650 Porcelain Cats

After tense days of waiting, a media drip feed of non-stories and gripping live-streamed footage of a London hospital door, the awaited moment has arrived at last. That’s right, it’s finally time for Britain to unleash its deluge of royal baby souvenirs. While generally not the most tasteful collection of objets ever created, it seems churlish to protest this expected wave, an inevitable cash-in after any royal event. Much of this year’s crop is probably made in Asia, but royal souvenirs are one of those cases where the astronomically expensive Windsor family actually lives up to claims that they’re good for British exports.

They also form a standard backdrop to much British daily life. I'm not from a royalist family, but even I grew up surrounded by commemorative regal paraphernalia, mostly inherited from my grandmother and from childhood trips to Windsor Castle, much loathed by me for its “keep off the grass” signs. Somewhere in the family kitchen, a stiff, doll-faced queen still gazes out from a threadbare 1953 coronation tea towel, though we never really used the boulder-heavy Charles and Di wedding urn my grandmother received from her church drama group, granted an extra sophisticated touch (for Britain in 1981) by being filled with instant coffee.