FOR hundreds of years, the "loyal subjects" of monarchs have felt entitled to know the personal business of their kings, queens and the constellation of minor royals that orbit around them. From the ritualised morning ablutions of the Sun King, Louis XIV in 17th-century France(where he would perform on his ornate potty in full view of an intimate audience made up of a few dozen confidantes) to the acute morning sickness of the Duchess of Cambridge, the bodies of royalty are a source of enduring and sometimes prurient curiosity.

It’s as if their anatomies were divinely differentiated from everyone else's, and what happens within them was imbued with a para-mystical significance. Paradoxically, the monarch also operates as a sort of public role model, whose popularity is borne from the belief that the royal family is just like any other family, suffering the the same slings and arrows as commoners do.

Strangely, the British people seem to wear this fundamental contradiction in the relationship with the royal family pretty well (or maybe we just don’t think about it?).

Physiologically, nothing is off-limits or sacred, neither the lungs or bladder of Prince Philip, nor the intestinal workings of the Queen. And when a royal dies, they lie in state for days in order that their people may file past to gaze in respect and awe. More than 200,000 people queued for over four hours to walk past the coffin of the Queen Mother as she lay in state for three days at Westminster Hall in 2002.

For most of us, the news that the Duchess of Cambridge is expecting another child is neither here nor there. It’s nice for her and her husband and maybe for the grandparents, too. It’s unlikely to make any material difference to how we feel about life, our work, our worries. The only significant thing in this story is that it is a headline story at all. The media delighted in sharing the good news, convinced, no doubt, that the nation would be cheered by it in a week that saw floods, forest fires and hurricanes of biblical proportions.

And to top it all, we have the continuing wacky machinations of Kim Jong-un, threatening to turn us all into toast as his stubby wee finger hovers over the nuclear button.

It’s not so much that we shouldn’t be interested at all in the news of the Duchess’s pregnancy. What's concerning, however, is the level and intensity of interest and the assumption on the part of the media that this (news) package of joy will have real meaning for us. Do the powers-that-be in the media actually believe we will share this joy, feel hopeful about the future and not worry too much about Armageddon just because another royal is on the way?

From a psychological perspective, our obsession with the royals is complex and difficult to understand. By way of explanation, the usual suspects get rolled out: we love archetypes and fairytales, paupers-to-princes, beauty over beast, golden carriages and happy-ever-afters. A long time ago in the days when people believed the world was flat and that the king or queen was hand-picked by God and therefore had a divine right to reign, it’s easy to empathise with why folk thought that royalty were super-human and why their taxes had to keep them in the manner to which they had become accustomed.

Today, things haven’t changed much. Commoners continue to be treated as passive yet greedy consumers of the royal fairytale. The media is the grand ringmaster behind this celebrity circus. When it comes to our voyeuristic tendencies and the guilty pleasure of peeking into Hello! magazine (but only because your dentist was running late), the experiential difference between ogling gossipy photos of the Duchess of Cambridge and trying to work out if Kim Kardashian’s bum is actually that big, is probably nil. In some mysterious way, these images and the stories they peddle satisfy a primitive part of our brains.

What other country has a monarchy that is so enduring? If the royal family are good at anything, it is their power to adapt and survive and to keep the fairytale spinning and the income stream flooding in. They may not be personally objectionable (they are, after all, just doing what they know best), but maybe it’s time we developed enough imagination to write our own fairytale rather than be spoon-fed the same old guff that gets plated up to us over and over again.

There must be more nourishing fare than this.