Even royals such as Prince William realise birth is a great leveller Prince William with his wife, the Duchess of Cambridge. He will one day nominate fatherhood as his finest achievement. PRINCE William has comforted bushfire victims and lost his mother in a car crash. Yet no grief prepares one for the jolt of seeing your partner in labour. William is about to discover the sole advantage of balding, for it is one of nature's wonders that all men who still sprout head hair do not shed it at the first glimpse of fatherhood. Child birth may be biology's most elemental process. To observe it is surely the first step in the human male's maturation from young and macho to old and useless. You cannot stop your partner's pain. You cannot ease it. William is a royal, true, but he is also a modern man confronting humanity's rawness of being. Logic dictates he will present for it much as every other bloke does the first time around. He will strain for credibility and bumble about like a wombat on a highway. If William has been briefed on the details, or turned up to any of those classes with the videos and diagrams, he will have urged his wife to have an epidural at the first twinge. He will have lied and told her to do so only because he thinks it's best for her. Better, he may have encouraged a caesarean section. Would anyone dare tell his wife she is "too posh to push"? He may have spoken to others who have gone before and so learnt that his advice throughout the labour will be ignored by everyone else in the room. He may feel like he isn't there at all. This will be useful practice for home visits from his wife's friends in the months ahead, when he might feel an urge to go outside and smoke, even if he has never smoked. Once, fathers were barred from the labour ward. This protocol enhanced two highly evolved male qualities: the illusion of control and a knack for looking the other way. William, in following a script road-tested by his father, will be posted in the ward, to stand proud and purposeful, for a moment or so, until he notices that the medical monitor in the corner of the suite, turned off and wrapped in plastic, does not provide inane commentary and is not getting in everyone's way. His earnest efforts at being Steven Spielberg and committing the event to video, just to take his mind off the fear that he may faint at the important bit, will be a waste of time because, he will later discover, child birth videos are even more lame than wedding videos. He may also want to remove the said video from his phone, lest he find the child watching his or her own birth three or so years later. These are just hypotheticals, of course. William is a passenger in a long journey: at some point, in future, he may help steer its direction. For now, his grander position commands a few more privileges than the average father. He should have at least been assured - as is possible in an eastern suburbs Melbourne hospital - that he lucks into a delivery suite with a balcony (for "time outs" during the delivery). He should assume no one will notice when he is not there. He should also have been warned about phone carriers with patchy reception. There is nothing to suggest that Kate's pregnancy will be overdue, and that the birth will then be induced, and that then nothing much will happen. It seems unlikely he will then be sent home to play with the dog and wait for the phone to ring, which it won't, because the carrier's signal is so poor in his part of royal suburbia that he will instead hear the phone beep long after the hospital has called repeatedly. Surely, he will not receive a phone message after midnight that says, in effect: GET HERE YESTERDAY AND, LIKE, WHY THE HELL IS YOUR PHONE OFF, YOU MORON? Nor will he and Kate have to share a hospital room with another new family for the first night. As new Mum learns the basics of feeding and new Dad explains that nappies don't work, William will not be jostled by strangers collectively jammed on the volume setting of a Guns N' Roses concert. ONE also assumes the royal couple have settled on a name. They do not want to have agreed on a compromise neither of them really like, in part because the father has secretly discovered he can't pronounce it after a few beers, or a name both parents reject after the birth. William does not want to delay the post-baby group text message announcement. He does not want to resort to trawling the Herald Sun birth notices for inspiration as hospital visitors cluck and dote over little "It." Again, such scenarios are hypothetical. He will, however, discover that the supposed feelings of new fatherhood can be misplaced. Numbness overwhelms elation. Shows of joy disguise fear. Relief supplants wonder. Puzzlement splices love. The simpler joys will sharpen, of course, often in unexpected rushes at unlikely moments, say, when the crying suddenly stops at 4am and the prospect of 30 minutes' sleep is welcomed like the gift of a trip to Fiji. It makes no difference that William is a royal. He will be obliged to perpetuate a fairytale. Everyone is. The royals may have a few advantages: the question of private schooling, in the non-royal world, demands an unrighteous prominence in early childhood. But some truths are universal. William will one day nominate fatherhood as his finest achievement. The role will eventually cost him his remaining hair. It will toy with his memory, too. For at some point, assuming good health, either he or his wife will crack a joke to the other. It might be dismissed as crazy talk. Yet the notion will plant and flower. Suddenly, it will make perfect sense for them to do it again - all except for the video part.