10. What Is King Charles Really Like?

 Ok, so that was an interesting account of a royal butler’s time with Charles and his sons. And of course we encountered lots of useful vocabulary in that. Let’s look at it now in more detail.

Number one was a phrasal verb put up with, which means accept or tolerate something that you don’t like without complaining.

An example sentence with this phrasal verb would be, I can’t put up with this noise any longer. I can’t put up with this noise any longer.

In the context of our royal piece, Charles is asking if Harrold could put up with the job, which means could he handle the unusual, sometimes difficult life inside a royal household?

So handle there is another word you can use instead of put up with. You can also say tolerate, endure, accept. But these are more formal and not for casual usage.

Put up with is used more often in everyday speech. And we often use a phrasal verb in informal English, in everyday English, instead of a Latinate verb. So be careful with that, if you speak a Latin language. We’re much more likely to say put up with than tolerate in anything but the most formal contexts.

Number two, if you remember, was not suffer fools gladly. And this is an idiom, and it’s only used in the negative or at least most of the time in the negative. To not suffer fools gladly.

And it describes someone who becomes angry with people who they think are stupid. And this sounds a bit mean, but it doesn’t mean that the person is unkind. It just means they’re annoyed by people who should know better but they’re too lazy or ignorant to improve their knowledge on something.

So for example, The project manager doesn’t suffer fools gladly so don’t ask any stupid questions.

So the idea here is that it’s your fault if you ask stupid questions. The project manager is not very tolerant – he doesn’t suffer fools gladly – but really, you should know the answers.

Who else in the royal family, in the British royal family, had this reputation of not suffering fools gladly? Do you know? Well, King Charles’s father, the Duke of Edinburgh, who of course has now died, he was very straight-talking, which means honest, sometimes brutally honest, and he didn’t suffer fools gladly.

Number three this week was raise your voice, which is a phrase, and it’s a very useful one that we use very often.

It means speak more loudly, often when you’re angry. So if you speak more loudly because you’re angry, you’re raising your voice.

Don’t raise your voice at me, young lady! You could say to your daughter, your teenage daughter.

Now, what’s the opposite of this? If raise your voice means speak more loudly than what is speak more quietly?

Lower your voice.

Please lower your voice. People are trying to concentrate.

And we learnt in the story that the butler never heard King Charles, as he is now, raise his voice. This surprises me to be honest, because he does have a reputation, not for being unkind, but for being irritable. But maybe that’s only the case when he’s out and about and he has annoying journalists asking him questions, which is all we see, I guess. We don’t see him in his private home. And so I guess we have to believe the butler that he’s not really very irritable.

Which brings us onto number four, which was have a short temper, which apparently Charles doesn’t, according to Grant Harrold.

So to have a short temper means that you become angry easily on a regular basis, not just once – on a regular basis.

And you can also be short-tempered, so you can say, I have a short temper. Or you can say, I am short-tempered, with an -ed on the end.

Now what’s the opposite here? It’s not as obvious as the last one where we had raise and lower your voice as opposites, because here the opposite of a short temper is not a long temper, which would be the logical answer.

It’s even tempered, E-V-E-N, even tempered. But that’s not used much, really. So if you want to express the opposite of having a short temper, you would say, Oh, I’m easy-going, I’m laid-back. I’m patient as well. Easy-going, laid-back, patient.

And the last one was a phrase that also does not describe King Charles apparently, which is out of touch. To be out of touch.

Now, this means that you don’t understand the everyday lives, struggles or opinions of ordinary people. And somebody like King Charles would typically be seen as distant, privileged or detached from modern society.

And I don’t know King Charles, obviously, but from what I’ve seen, I do agree with the butler here because it’s not my impression that King Charles is out of touch at all.

He seems to me to know more about this country and what’s happening and the lives of ordinary people than most people do.

He’s always visiting charities, visiting ordinary people, talking to them. Apparently he remembers you. If you’ve talked to him once, he’ll, he’ll remember some details about your life, maybe even your name, the next time you talk to him.

So he pays attention. And he sees a lot more than the rest of us. He travels a lot. So, yeah, I, it makes sense to me that what the butler says is true, that he’s very much not out of touch at all.

I’m not sure what your impression is of King Charles, from your vantage point, whichever country you live in. But I think the view of him is quite mixed, isn’t it? Queen Elizabeth II, the view of her was more positive, especially towards the end of her life. Everybody loved her.

And I actually know somebody via someone else, so like a second-degree acquaintance who used to clean at Windsor Castle. And apparently the Queen was amazing. She never criticised the cleaner’s work. She remembered their names. She used to come and see them about once a month or something, and she would have presents bought for them and for their families. She was apparently really, really kind.

And I would imagine the same thing is true of King Charles, at least according to Grant Harrold. But it’s true he has a bit more of a character.

Now I have to say that this same person who used to clean at Windsor Castle also cleaned Frogmore Cottage when Harry and Meghan were living there, and apparently she could wallpaper her house with all of the critical notes she got.

Now, I promised you that I would recommend TV series and films for you to watch in English, if you enjoy stories about the royal family and also butlers and servants more generally – so those who work in other people’s houses.

The Crown is the obvious one. The Crown. And this follows Queen Elizabeth II’s reign and is based on reality, but take it with a pinch of salt. That means don’t believe absolutely everything. Of course, they had to invent some conversations and things.

Then we have Downton Abbey, which is a series. It’s not about the Royals, but in this series you will follow an aristocratic family, and of course, they have a butler and many other servants, and it’s a brilliant series.

And now two film recommendations.

The first one is The Remains of the Day. The Remains of the Day, and the main character in this film is a butler, played by Anthony Hopkins.

And the housekeeper, which is the most important female servant, is played by Emma Thompson. And this is an adaptation of the novel by the Nobel-Prize-winning author, Kazuo Ishiguro, who I love.

And if you like murder mysteries you might like to try Gosford Park. Gosford Park. And this is a country house mystery with a strong focus on life below stairs. And when you say life below stairs, it means the lives of the servants, and it teaches you a lot about how these big country houses were run.