What does the Millennial Prince of Wales have for his peers?

The Queen was the Queen, untouchable, distant and not a little Godlike, while all else were subjects.

And yet age softened her to a grandmotherly figure, made her more approachable and more relatable. Which is funny, because these war generation women were tough old birds. Proper grannies, who could knit, sew, bake, change a tyre and rewire a plug. Bosoms of comfort and spines of steel.

Relatability is normally the concern of politicians and morning show TV anchors. It was not the concern of monarchy.

Monarchy was about mystique and spectacle, enough so to keep the public subservient. We see the vestiges of it in how the old traditions have played out during the past few days.

Looked at dispassionately, it is all deeply bizarre. Watching the procession move from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Hall: there's a man with ribbons and a sword in full military dress. There's his brother who served in Afghanistan, barred from military dress essentially because he fell in love.

LONDON, ENGLAND - SEPTEMBER 14: Prince William, Prince of Wales, King Charles III, Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester, Anne, Princess Royal and Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex walk behind the coffin during the procession for the Lying-in State of Queen

There's a who load of folk wearing giant fur hats moving in regimented sway behind a box with a body inside and thousands of people lined up to watch them.

It's a hard sell, all this, and yet it's not because people enjoy ritual, are comforted by it and have emotional attachments to monarchy that go beyond common sense.

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Queen Elizabeth served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) in 1945, as did my gran. They were both mothers and grandmothers of a certain generation, one that experienced the same context of war, the same music and the same fashions. These generational commonalities do shape you.

Down a generation, my mother and King Charles are about the same age. She doesn't look at Charles and Camilla and see any common ground but will speak with some familiarity about Diana, because they were both pregnant and young mums at the same time.

It remains to be seen what sort of king Charles will be, whether there is any such thing, now, as a good king and a bad king.

On Monday I took the train to Edinburgh to report on the cortege moving from the Palace of Holyroodhouse to St Giles' Cathedral. In the carriage was a couple dressed in jackets bearing the Platinum Jubilee emblem and who were trying to call up the Sky News reporting from Edinburgh on a phone.

I set them up with a livestream of the coverage on my phone and after a few moments a ScotRail staff member came to watch along with us, sharing thoughts on the royal family and the Queen and the events of the previous few days.

KING'S LYNN, ENGLAND - SEPTEMBER 15: Catherine, Princess of Wales and Prince William, Prince of Wales view floral tributes at Sandringham on September 15, 2022 in King's Lynn, England. The Prince and Princess of Wales are visiting Sandringham to view

It is endlessly interesting to hear the individual takes about the royal family and how people project their own selves onto individual royals, and how we do this collectively, projecting the national mood onto a group of people who really bear no relation to us at all.

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Prince Charles has been ratty in public with a couple of fountain pens this week. He is an elderly man with a billion sets of eyes on him, forced to fly around the country and march distances in heavy costume. His mother has just died.

You might be grouchy too, if ink leaked stained your fingers or was in your way.

At Hillsborough Castle, near Belfast, he snapped. "I can’t bear this bloody thing," he said, of the pen, as the ink bled onto his hands. "Every stinking time.” That seems pretty restrained, to me.

Maybe, though, his short temper is a sign he is unfit to be king. Either you empathise with the chap or you think he's a cantankerous old man about to bring down the monarchy.

It is all projection. Everyone has a view on what it all must mean but, like great pieces of art or complex works of literature, it means just whatever you want it to mean.

Britain has King Charles now but next it will be William, a Millennial prince, and how will his generation project on to him?

My gran could look at the Queen and feel an inbuilt deference her generation was raised with but that feeling has faded through the generations and so what, for my generation, are we left with?

Prince William clearly takes his duties seriously and, despite some gossip never substantiated sufficiently to be published, has styled himself successfully as a devoted husband and father.

This would have greatly impressed my gran, who would have seen him as a responsible and upstanding young man. This sanitised respectability does nothing for his relatability for his fellow Millenials and the generations below us.

Our peers are less likely to be married, less likely to have children. The economy has left them in a state of arrested development - unable to afford property as their parents could, with unstable career opportunities and higher debts.

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How do we look at the new Prince and Princess of Wales and see anything familiar reflected back? I'm sure Kate Middleton's an absolute gas on a night out but there's little sense of that from her eternally polished and perfect public image.

Twice-married career girl Meghan Markle, with her fondness for avocado toast, at least has an interesting enough backstory that you can dig out areas of overlap, if you were drawing a Venn diagram of a commoner and a duchess.

This week's pomp and ceremony reaches hands back to the past but asks us to look to the future too. William and Kate are oft-vaunted as the royal family's youthful new face but now, as the Millennials fast approach middle age, what do they have to offer by way of common ground with us younger commoners?

Very little, yet it will be vital for the future of the monarchy for a Millennial Prince of Wales to take on the ancient role and make it relevant to a modern public.