I admired the young Charles — and still do

Steiner, his parents Austrian émigrés from Nazism, was wildly popular with undergraduates and sneered at by fellow dons. His lectures were events in themselves, attended mostly by young students trying to broaden our personal horizons. I was new to this speaker and listened intently to him: a polymath with a hint of the visionary, of the prophet, about him.

He had (wrote AS Byatt) “an instinct for the driving ideas of our time”. In retrospect it does not surprise me that Charles was attracted to this thinking. Steiner’s subject, really, was culture, literature, belief and meaning — the meaning, almost, of life itself. One departed his lectures perhaps a little unsure what his actual argument had been, yet inspired by the richness of his thought and language. I could not shake off a certain suspicion; but, like most of us there, I left with a sense that we’d heard a good man speak.

A phrase of Steiner’s that morning stuck in my mind: “the anarchic mystery of the human soul”. I should be surprised if that boy on a bicycle didn’t note it too. My fellow undergraduate was a seeker, tormented by some inner call and determined to find the answer.

He has always had a place for holy men and gurus. It speaks to a yearning for meaning in a life ever prone to being engulfed by nonsense. So was the Duke of Edinburgh. Most men are more like their fathers than they wish to believe.

Since the King’s and my paths converged briefly on that autumn morning, they have diverged utterly. I’ve had a long, busy and satisfying career, succeeding in some jobs and failing in others but always with the focus of my work just a few days ahead of me and the purpose clear. My job titles have been specific, hard-edged. Between being chosen for a job and starting it, I’ve never had to wait.

• How Charles and Camilla’s blended family reflects modern Britain

And that boy on the bicycle? Half a century of waiting. Just waiting. Waiting for a position to become vacant. Waiting for the role that explains the two bodyguards cycling behind him. For him, no clear job description. The real job was always his, but never yet.

Of course, he has worked harder than most of us. But the focus, the point of it all — the throne — has been for ever “not yet”. We only get a hundred years at most, usually less. For some almighty celestial “pause” button to be hit straight after university and then for 50 years to have your hands tied until the day you can even start . . . that is cruel.

Even as he cycled to that lecture, the first Prince of Wales to go to university, Charles will have known his destiny was to be a bridge: a bridge from a known world that was passing, the world that produced him, to a world still mysterious that lay ahead. For 50 years he has stood, stuck, contemplating the mists into which the bridge disappears.

However nimbly, his late mother stayed on the old, firm, known side of the bridge. Her reign was a triumph for monarchy, but the triumph was achieved by intelligent, flexible conservatism: accepting limited change in order that things should remain fundamentally the same. For her it was enough — if conducted with grace — to be rather than to do. It just needed poise.

She wasn’t looking for direction. I doubt the word “achieve” would, to her, have felt central to her purpose. Charles is different and will need to be. He has always known his reign will be some kind of a leap. But to where? How far? How fast? And how long has he got?

Today’s coronation may carry the reassuring familiarity of the old, but it points forward into unknown space. A man is being crowned today: a man who has always been ahead of his time, and still filled with new ideas and purposes, but an old man nonetheless. What uncertainty, what unknowables, what a swirling fog those old eyes peer into today.

Pick a day. The Times’s Hilary Rose, writing last Friday, chose such a day last month. Our new King is now 74. George Steiner is dead and the bicycle is history. Charles spent the morning at a food bank, then having his hand kissed by the incoming lord steward, receiving the president of the Bundestag, then handling a phone call with the prime minister.

Ambassadors arrive, ambassadors leave, hands are shaken, plaques unveiled . . . how far from the anarchic mystery of the human soul. Yet amid all this, he must find the time and quietude to look at the stars; the energy to keep up with the advance of science and the spread of ideas; and the patience not to snap when royal psychodramas intrude.

I know what it is to be past 70. I tire more quickly, forget names, strain to keep up in quick-fire conversation and must keep at bay a weary cynicism about the future. Had I been able at Steiner’s lecture to see myself aged 73, I would have seen a man approaching the end of a thrilling, satisfying career and, his work mostly done, looking forward to taking his foot off the pedal.

I no longer greet each dawn itching to push forward new ideas, greet new people, open myself up to a changing world and work until I drop. Given the gift of foresight, I would have seen my life as an enjoyable arc, but arching back down after 70.

Had the boy on the bicycle had similar foresight, he would have seen half a century of waiting around, trying not to become bitter, angry or stale — until, only at 73, he could embrace the great purpose of his life. At the foot of a bridge whose span and whose other end he cannot know stands an old man still fired by enthusiasm, by ideas and by personal faith. I admired him then and I admire him now.