Prince Charles is ready to give his family a hug after months of isolation during the ongoing novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
The royal shared in a recent interview that being away from his family during the pandemic has been “terribly sad.”
“I haven’t seen my father for a long time, and he’s going to be 99 next week,” Charles told Sky News on Thursday, adding he’s also been apart from his four grandchildren — Prince William and Kate Middleton’s three kids, Prince George, 6, Princess Charlotte, 5, and Prince Louis, 2, and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s 1-year-old son Archie — for quite some time.
“So I’ve been doing FaceTime, [it’s] all real well but… well, it is terribly sad,” he admitted. “Let alone one’s friends.”
“But I mean, fortunately, you can speak to them on telephones and occasionally do this sort of thing,” he added, referring to video calls. “But it isn’t the same, is it? You really want to give people a hug.”
Charles, 71, went on to say that he “totally” understands “so many people’s frustration, difficulties, grief and anguish” during the global public health crisis.
“I mean, I’m just trying to do my best to find and help and encourage ways to enable people to go on doing it. But in a way that doesn’t wreck everything at the same time around us,” he said.
In April, Charles revealed that he’s been keeping busy at his home in the Scottish highlands during the pandemic in part by watching funny viral videos.
“We have seen the very best use of technology — allowing us to keep working, but also to keep in touch through virtual parties, games, singing — and some of the funniest videos I have seen for a long time!” he wrote in an article for Country Life magazine.
He added that it is “reassuring to see that adversity is bringing out the very best in people.”
Charles himself previously tested positive for COVID-19, experiencing “relatively mild symptoms” for about a week.
“As we are all learning this is a strange, frustrating and often distressing experience when the presence of family and friends is no longer possible and the normal structures of life are suddenly removed,” he said in April, offering words of solidarity with others finding it difficult to cope.
“At such an unprecedented and anxious time in all our lives, my wife and I are thinking particularly of all those who have lost their loved ones in such very difficult and abnormal circumstances, and of those having to endure sickness, isolation and loneliness,” he added.
