A royal appointment I’m happy to keep, despite my reservations - Susan Dalgety

As Honorary Patron of the Scotland Malawi Partnership (SMP), whose offices are in the High Street building, she is popping in to see the charity’s 20th anniversary photographic exhibition.

It captures images from two decades of people-to-people connections between our two countries, from school partnerships to health programmes.

This is my second time meeting Princess Anne. The first was across the road, at a similar event to mark the SMP’s tenth anniversary, where I found her to be as down-to-earth and well informed as her most fervent supporters claim.

I was also fortunate enough to attend a charity seminar in Buckingham Palace last year, where she was the keynote speaker. I was so impressed by her grasp of the challenges facing charities like the SMP that I even wrote about it here.

I am not a natural Royalist. All my life, I have baulked against the hierarchies that keep ordinary people in their place. My approach to life echoes that of Robert Burns who argued in his classic poem A Man’s a Man for a That, that status should matter less than a person’s true worth. He wrote: “The rank is but the guinea’s stamp, The Man’s the gowd for a’ that.”

But in the Princess Royal we have a public figure who has both status and worth. At 75 years of age, she has the energy of a woman 50 years her junior.

She is one of the hardest working members of the Royal Family, second only to her brother, the King. And she does not go in for ostentatious displays of wealth. She recycles clothes she wore as a young woman and looks fabulous every time.

My dress tomorrow is ten years old, and in honour of Princess Anne I decided not to rush out and buy a new frock in the January sales, as I was tempted to do.

If vintage style is good enough for Royalty, then it is fine for a mere commoner like me to meet a princess in an old frock (but with new shoes).