Emma Cowing: Tears of joy for baby don't wash Who are these people who stand outside hospitals for hours on end in order to celebrate the birth of a child they will never know? You know the ones, with their Union Flag hats and their flasks of tea and their wide, toothy grins. They say things like, "I'm ever so pleased for them" and "they deserve it so much" while wiping away a joyful tear, as if they were intimately acquainted with the parents they don't know of a child they will never know who belong to a family who have absolutely no interest in their existence whatsoever. The Royal baby is less than two days old and is already, I'm sorry to say, on its way to becoming a right Royal bore. The TV is awash with "news specials" which seem to involve "experts" standing around saying things like "of course, it's incredibly uplifting for the whole country" and "this is what the world has been waiting for." Meanwhile Sky News has deployed a helicopter to circle the hospital in which the baby was born and one newspaper - no prizes for guessing which - changed its name to The Son in honour of the momentous occasion of a baby being born, something which, incidentally, happens on average 2,000 times every day in the United Kingdom, and usually with much less fuss and bother. I was in Canada recently, where the Royal baby coverage was still rather endemic, if a little less fawning than on this side of the pond. "I wish Kate would just have it," said one Canadian newscaster last week. So we can stop talking about the damned thing. Ah, the naivety. Because for all those grumbling about the wall-to-wall coverage, the commemorative tat and the disruption to normal TV scheduling (they even cancelled the Jeremy Kyle Show on ITV1 yesterday morning for goodness sake), this is just the beginning. An amuse-bouche, if you like, of what lies in store for us, the long suffering masses, who must swallow a whole five courses of this nonsense because it is, apparently, an important and historic event that is part of our culture. There will be the naming of the child, and then of course the christening. There will be the first steps and the first foreign trip and then, a few years down the line, the first day at school. Along the way there will be the tea towels and the mugs, the high chairs and the baby bibs (even Highgrove, home of Prince Charles, has produced commemorative baby shoes) - an endless cacophony of coverage and merchandise designed to remind us that in the 21st century, an accident of birth can still mean everything. A lot of the hype and excitement over the birth of this child has centred around the fact that it will be "our future King." What seems to have escaped most people, however, is that if his grandfather and father have anything like the staying power of great granny, most of us will long since have shuffled off the mortal coil by the time he makes it on to the throne. So a future king yes, but for whom? For the generation of babies being born right now I suppose, who will have to grow up constantly hearing about this young prince, born into a life of unimaginable privilege and wealth, while they struggle to make their way in a world dominated by austerity, recession and economic sobriety. I don't mean to sound like a grump, really I don't. I'm very happy that the baby was born healthy, in the way that I'm happy when I hear that any baby born to parents I don't know is born healthy. Babies being born is generally a good thing. But really, that's as far as it goes. I'm a tad disappointed that it wasn't a girl, if only because it would have allowed one of the most old-fashioned institutions in the country to make a progressive feminist statement by changing the law to allow her to become Queen, which would have tickled my feminist funny-bone no end, but other than that, my interest wanes. And I suspect I am not alone. This is not necessarily a Scottish thing. I know plenty of English people as bored by the whole circus as I am. The notion that as a nation we are somehow joined together in jubilant celebration over the coming of an infant child is a collective lie. I don't care how many fountains turned blue or buildings lit up or military bands playing Congratulations there were, the number of people in this country with anything more than a passing interest in the Royal birth is small, minute almost. And let's face it, most of them were outside the Lindo Wing yesterday morning wearing a Union Flag hat and a wide, toothy grin.