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Earlier this week, as one of the first pictures from the visit of Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, appeared in the papers, a glamorous friend sent me a note.

“Could those three greyhairs look any more dull?” she asked of one photo, which showed Prime Minister Stephen Harper perusing a program, all but oblivious to the royal couple beside him. “Surely politics and monarchy are about image? Style?” Her message to them, my very stylish friend harrumphed, was this: “Your job is to inspire me, surely, not to be dreary on my dime?”

She wasn't the last to have a kick at the Charles-Camilla can: “Royal couple fail to dazzle like Diana,” one mournful headline I saw, captured the general tone of the complaints. My friend Rosie DiManno of The Toronto Star quoted Andrew Morton, the Diana biographer, saying that while this visit would be a relevant litmus test for the monarchy, he predicted “two 60-year-old Brits wandering around Canada will not set pulses racing.”

They all have a point. I do not disagree with any of it, and although I'm a fan of the monarchy as a useful Canadian institution, that's where it ends. I would say you couldn't pay me enough to watch a royal visit, but that is clearly not true, as I've covered such tours in the past. But my pulse never raced and it isn't racing now.

Still, there's a small part of me – a small, wrinkly, age-spotted and given the cruelty of time I suppose potentially even a mustachioed part – that is also solidly cheering for Camilla. She gives all of us old broads hope.

She doesn't have much style? Neither do I. She's got the bad Farrah Fawcett hair from the 1980s? Feh. I have hair from the late 1950s, as the tragic Grade 1 picture my late mother kept and passed on to me reveals. And my bangs have the same tendency as the Duchess's do to flip up at the sides, like wings; only a good hard ironing will keep them in line. (Bangs are the only thing I iron.) She looks awkward carrying flowers? You should have seen me at my first wedding; I carried my bouquet like I was wielding a club. She seems more comfortable around horses, wearing Wellies? Give me quality time with my dog any day over most human company.

Best of all, from my perspective, is that the consensus is that Camilla hasn't had any work done – meaning plastic surgery, Botox, skin resurfacing, implants or any of the myriad of procedures that are de rigueur now for many women of my vintage and much younger – and that although she looks her age, although how anyone can tell any more is beyond me, she also looks pretty good considering, or at least not outright repellent. That's my bar now too: Today, I will strive to look not outright repellent.

There's something else too.

I covered one of the visits Charles made to Canada with Diana. Beautiful she was, with those huge eyes, splendid smile and long legs. Anything looked good on her. And yes, she was charming, and seemed genuinely kind, as much as you can tell when you're watching a public person being with her public. I was there when she visited Casey House in Toronto, an AIDS hospice, and saw how lovely she was with the residents, touchy at a time when the disease still frightened people. And she seemed affectionate and natural with her kids.

But as Mr. Morton's book and others and countless press stories revealed, Diana was also neurotic, maybe even narcissistic, bulimic, savvy and manipulative with the press and her adoring public, a woman scorned (by Charles, first) who thereafter staked out a firm claim on victimhood. I always had the sense that after hours, in the privacy of whatever castle they were at, her conversation might have consisted of, “Was I the prettiest?” and “Did you really love that dress?”

I will say no more, lest I be as mean to Diana in death as people are being to Camilla now. No one but the two participants ever really knows the interior of a marriage anyway, least of all with one so distanced by its enormous celebrity. The extreme of that lesson is driven home in some of the court cases I cover, where relationships that appeared happy, and there are always pictures to prove it, end with the parties occasionally doing terrible violence to one another.

Of course, there's no reason style and substance can't coexist. That glamorous friend I mentioned, for instance, has one of the sharpest minds I've encountered, and is an original thinker. She's not just a pretty face and a beautiful babe, although those things she is too. She is incapable of dreariness.

But most women aren't her, can't look like her, less look like Diana, or how Diana would look now were she still alive. Most of us probably were a little beautiful in our youth – there was one period, when I was about 18, about two weeks long, that I remember when I was as thin as I ever would be and reasonably put together – and only the very plainest of us didn't wield sexual power then.

But when this is all that is ever valued in a woman, how she looks and what she wears, when talk radio hosts feel free to make open fun of Camilla merely for being 62 and having bad hair, it kind of makes you want to slash your wrists.

I would never have guessed it, but I am consoled by what one of my favourite photographers, a reprobate with a disdain for articles, always said of women: “All look same in dark.” Amen to that.