Mike and Zara Tindall are perhaps the most laid-back couple in the Royal Family.
It is in part down to the fact that Zara, Princess Anne’s daughter, was not given a title at birth after Anne wanted her and her brother, Peter, to lead normal lives.
In doing so, Zara gained the right to a private life but also retained the privileges of being part of the Firm albeit without public duties and entitlement to taxpayer’s money.
Mike, meanwhile, never moved in royal circles before meeting Zara, having grown up in Yorkshire and made his name in playing professional rugby.
A self-professed straight-talking Yorkshireman, Mike previously opened up about his regrets when dealing with his father, Philip, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease.
The first time Mike found out his dad had Parkinson’s was back in 2003 during the Rugby World Cup in Australia, the same time and place he met Zara at a bar.
He told Charco Neurotech that being “a typical northern bloke”, it took his dad a fair amount of time to see someone about the struggles he had been having with things like writing. On finally seeing a doctor, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s.
At the time, Mike was moving towards the peak of his rugby career, with various tours, training commitments, and regular matches. As such, he rarely got to see his dad and remained “fairly blasé about it for the next six or seven years”.
At first, he didn’t take his father’s illness too seriously. Looking at other people who had it, such as Muhammad Ali, his father seemed so far removed from the debilitating effects displayed in others.
“I feel that if I’d have taken more notice then, I could have made him get on top of staying physically fit and in shape – but that’s all hindsight because it’s the knowledge that I have now that might not have been there in 2003,” he said.
“I wish I’d paid more interest in what was going on with Parkinson’s and done a little bit more research back then.”
During his and Zara’s 2011 wedding, Philip was “in and out of a wheelchair” for the whole of the ceremony due to an operation on his back to tackle another symptom of his Parkinson’s.
