I am admiring the pink plastic umbrella being flourished by a colleague, who purchased it recently at Toys R Us. “I love it,” she tells me enthusiastically, “it’s nearly indestructable”, singing the umbrella’s praises while waving it about. “I won’t open it in here, though,” she says reassuringly. “It will bring us both bad luck”, and I thank her for sparing us from some unnamed minor doom.

The umbrella’s hand grip is a solid plastic figurine depicting a princess with impeccable posture, her long blonde hair just covering her shoulders, a diamond tiara perched regally on top. I am fascinated to note that, when the umbrella is in active use, the princess will be doing a royal headstand, with only the tip — her tiara, and a few locks of her rigid blonde coiffure — visible below the umbrella-bearer’s grip. She — the princess — is wearing a flowing, floor-length pink ballgown, which is cinched in to accentuate the narrow waist where she demurely rests one white-gloved hand; the other hand rests modestly on her (quite modest) décolletage. The gown does not budge one iota as she is being flourished, and her smile is consistently magestic: as if at a remove from this overly familiar treatment of the royal self.

This must be one of the requirements of a modern princess, I realize: to maintain one’s composure even while inverted, borne disrepectfully about Vancouver through day after record-setting day of rain. To be capable of commanding the complete obedience of one’s ballgown, demanding that it disregard the laws of gravity which bind non-royal garments, thereby ensuring that not even a smidgen of the royal knickers are ever publicly revealed.