ONE of the things we journalists do is talk to celebrities and royalty. It is our job.

If you get a bunch of hacks chatting about the famous folk they’ve met, the thunder of dropped names soon drowns out normal conversation.

Many of my colleagues have interviewed royalty. I have not. I have spoken to a member of the royal family, Princess Anne, and she has spoken to me, though it was an interview only in the most relaxed sense of the word.

I and former Examiner photographer Rodney Lee Crowther, inevitably known to his best mates as Rodney Loo Cleaner, were sent to cover the Bramham Horse Trials near York when it was announced that Princess Anne would be riding.

We asked around where the hardest and potentially wettest jump was to be found, and sat down to wait.

Rodney was watching for an unusual picture and I was kind of hoping that Princess Anne would fall off her horse, not because I’m a Republican or anything, but I had an idea it might be quite funny.

We were not disappointed. The tenth in line to the throne bobbed over the fence and slid off her horse ignominiously into a deepish and very muddy pool.

Rodney stood up and got a picture. I stood up and shouted the first thing that came into my head. “How’s it going so far, Your Royal Highness?”

The response was a throttled “Bagger orf.”

I believe this to be some form of southern abuse.

MP Barry Sheerman is not, as far as I know, royalty, but is definitely a celebrity. He and I have some unfinished business in the abuse field.

A very long time ago I was asked to cover an evening meeting at Honley Socialist Club. I walked in a good half hour before the meeting to find a chap putting leaflets on the seats.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked. “John Avison,” I said, ruffled by the impertinence. “And who the hell are you?”

It was Barry. Oh well, these things happen. I could have told him that Harold Wilson once poured me a cup of tea, but he wouldn’t have been impressed. This is not celebrity. Celebrity does not rub off. One cup of tea doth not a hero make.

My sister in law, walking, in Kensington one wintry day in the 1980s, bumped into Paul McCartney.

What did she say to him? “I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I just smiled.”

I didn’t ask too closely, but I suspect the same condition that leaves people speechless and blushing or blurtingly facile in front of their heroes briefly and embarrassingly affected my sister-in-law.

The problem with our royals today is that they inhabit a shell from which the magic of majesty, in its true sense, has fled. In olden days, you led the army charge in war and bashed people off their jousting horses in peacetime. You stood tall, and carried a big sword, and outsmarted your enemies.

At the languorous waft of a hand you committed people to the Tower or chopping block, and nobody batted an eyelid. Nobody dared challenge the king.

Most members of our royal family have put considerable effort into making themselves as ordinary as the chap and lass in the street, with their messy divorces, participation in It’s A Knockout and tax upsets.

The helicopters, private trains, jets, palaces, castles and large yachts now depict wealth, not majesty, which is why we tend to resent Royalty’s privileges and position in private while still curtseying to them and getting all confused when we meet them face to face.

Real power – which is, after all, what we’re talking about – plays hide and seek these days. Who really holds it?

It can’t be the disgraced bankers, in whose faces we would willingly spit. It can’t be the two-faced stuffed-shirts in the Commons, caught yet again with their trotters in the trough, pardon my mixed metaphors.

The levers of power are operated behind closed doors, leaving us ordinary folk to cast about for all sorts of unlikely heroes, like Jade Goody and Will Young and the stars of various soaps.

I was at the opening of a community barn a few months ago and the opener was a petite actress from The Archers. She was clearly a very pleasant sort of person, but the country folk among whom she was mingling were giving her adulation that was almost tangible.

Former Manchester United player Eric Cantona was feted recently at the Cannes Film Festival for his part in the Ken Loach film Looking For Eric.

He was chased through the streets by French fans shouting “le roi!” (the king!”) and almost killed in the surge of journalists wanting his autograph. Really, they should have known better.

“When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea,” said Eric once. He admitted he didn’t mean anything by it, but was taking the mickey gently out of the people who were almost worshipping him.

I have vowed that I will never again follow the trawler.