It’s usually TV family eruptions in EastEnders and Coronation Street that offer solace that our own dysfunctional familial relationships really aren’t that bad.

So, to learn that however gilded the chandeliers and blue the blood, family rifts can turn the ugliest offers a perverse fillip to anyone nursing fall-out from a tumultuous festive season cooped up with the fam.

With Prince Harry laying out every tiny piece of grubby linen from the royal households for public scrutiny, alleging a physical assault erupted from a heated row with his older brother about Meghan, no one can believe this right royal drama will end well.

Just days after revealing he wanted his father and brother back as family not an institution, a ‘leak’ from his book The Spare, out next Tuesday, detailed sibling fisticuffs which led to Harry falling on to a dog bowl cutting and injuring his back after the now Prince of Wales broke his necklace.

This latest instalment with its intimate detail is a soap writer’s dream. The point of no return has surely been reached.

Even before Spare hits the shelves, its contents are sending the royal family and households spare, just months from the King’s coronation.

The generational divide that divides reactions the incendiary actions of the Harry and Meghan tells a strong story. This division could well have been their strategy from the start – get the younger people on our side because they will understand how we feel because they think like us.

The accession of the King was met with a very different national response to that of his mother 70 years ago.

Thoughts and the national view of the royal family, especially now we have a new monarch, has changed, is more ambivalent and far less revered.

While the over 40s, accustomed to the never complain, never explain royal approach are outraged by the King’s younger son’s behaviour. How dare they, the spoilt ‘woke’ upstarts?

The under 40s, Millennials, or Gen Ys and Gen Zs, take a very different view.

Not swayed by the pomp and circumstance or societal position, many don’t give a jot about revering a royal family or the coronation. 
They care far more about how people are treated, fairness, tolerance and acceptance. They believe passionately that racism, personal, institutional or otherwise, must be called out, along with misogyny, classism, discrimination and prejudice.

While the oldies dismiss them as woke and whinging, the under 40s view them as strong for taking a stand and speaking out about their perceived wrongdoing and challenging an institution and its workings

Was this their tactic all along? The new monarchy desperately needs younger people to buy into it. Tradition means very little to younger people.

It may not a revolution - it’ll take more than hissy fits and sordid exposures to bring down the monarchy - but the couple are feeding youth apathy towards royalty into a clear anti-royal feeling out of empathy.

When Harry quotes his father saying to his sons: “Please boys. Don’t make my final years a misery,” younger people see it more as the other way round, that Harry and Megan’s lives were made a misery.

How can Harry and Megan even think of attending the coronation, the epitome of the institution they have trashed?

However, young people who applaud their courage for speaking out and speaking their minds will want them there with their heads held high.

The institution must realise it will score an own goal to do anything other than include them.

What a mess.

It will make the coronation a far more interesting affair with body language under scrutiny at every step.

Return of masks?

To wear a mask or not. That is the question.

Bugs and infections are rife and rampaging.

As 2023 got under way, professor Susan Hopkins, chief medical adviser at UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) told people to stay at home if they feel unwell to avoid more pressure on crushed A&E departments.

It is feared up to 500 lives were being lost each week because the NHS is unable to provide life-saving treatment, owing to delays and problems with emergency care.

This winter is likely to be the worst on record for A&E wait times, as hospitals experience rocketing demand driven by flu, Covid, and Strep A.

Meanwhile, businesses are getting tough on home workers – rumours are that some employers are so concerned about productivity of people working at kitchen tables they are secretly monitoring individuals’ keyboard strokes – are calling workers back into the office.

And there’s a train strike, so in cities buses are packed with coughing and sneezing people for two or more hours’ travel into offices to spread germs.

Let's be more like Catherine in 2023

Usual joined up thinking in Broken Britain

Mask wearing might be virtue signalling, it might make people feel safer, but the masks we wore throughout Covid had questionable effectiveness in avoiding transmission so would be pointless now?

The perfect pick-me-up for the new year is to have Happy Valley and Sarah Lancashire back as the indomitable, kind, take-no-nonsense Catherine Cawood.

She has a seemingly limitless capacity to deal with other people’s issues while smothered by her own. She gets on with it, says what she thinks, plays the game with a straight bat and is totally and utterly herself.

We could all do a lot worse than being more Catherine Cawood in 2023.