Royal wedding: the good news is in the post

North Korea has dabbled in commemorative royal stamps before, but it seems curtly disinterested in Wills and Kate

New Zealand has stamped its presence on the royal wedding with this issue, but where is North Korea's commemorative effort? Photograph: AP

• Those desirous of a scientific way of measuring how global William and Kate fever compares with royal weddings past are directed toward that most accurate barometer of earthling opinion: the North Korean postal service. Strange as it may seem in today's tetchier world, the People's Republic released commemorative stamps for the wedding of Charles and Diana in 1981. Indeed, to mark the birth of Prince William in 1982, Kim Il-sung commissioned a set of stamps featuring then state-of-the-art 3D technology. You know the sort: tilt it to a different angle and the picture changes; now you see the baby, now you don't.

As for where they'd go from that, scratch'n'sniff Wills'n'Kate would seem the logical progression – but it does seem one to phone the North Korean embassy about. (They're based in suburban Ealing, somewhat prosaically.) "I think you have made a mistake," says a chap who, despite affecting to put me through to a press office, appears to be both switchboard operator and communications chief, and may well have proved to be the ambassador himself, had I demanded to speak to his supervisor. "You mean to call the South Korean embassy." I most certainly do not. "You are saying the People's Republic produced stamps in 1981?" he demands. I most certainly am. A selection are on display in Beijing's National Postage Stamp Museum, and quite splendid examples they are too. Now, you do sound a wonderfully obliging chap – could you possibly find out if any William and Kate stamps are in circulation? "No," comes the curt reply, and down goes the phone. Ah well. Philately will get me nowhere, as Kathy Lette would doubtless observe.

• Now that the Queen has had Kate Middleton's parents to lunch, do let us lay these tired suggestions of unbridgeable social chasms finally to bed. The families would have had much in common. After all, it is a fact insufficiently acknowledged that in the great scheme of global blue blood, the Windsors are really rather middle class. Why, it is far too often left to Princess Michael to point out that the match she made was frightfully déclassé. Scions of Nazis always marry down, of course, but in the case of Marie-Christine the stoop to wed Prince Michael was compounded by the Windsors' comparative bourgeoisie, with even the Queen reported to have described her as "rather grand for us".

Thus it fell to Princess Michael to point out that Fergie was "common", and to observe that the decor at Windsor Castle was "awful". (Having said that, her exquisite candour never eclipsed that of the Queen's late sister. It was said that on the way out of a screening of Schindler's List, Princess Margaret turned to her companion to deliver the stage-whispered verdict: "Oh those fucking Jews … always moaning.")

• As billed, today's edition of our regular feature Know Your Pundits stars Ingrid Seward, editor of Majesty magazine and a longtime royal expert, who tells the Wall Street Journal that she has averaged a TV appearance a day since the engagement was announced in November (though that is likely to have increased severalfold by now). The stress has caused Ingrid to take up smoking again, poor luv, but her lung capacity's loss is a nation's gain, as the royal subject upon which madam cannot be prevailed upon to give a quote has yet to be found.

Here she is on Kate Middleton's slender frame, about which the tabloids are just managing to restrain themselves until after the wedding, when they can start on the anorexia/compromised fertility plot lines. "I heard on the grapevine that her food went back almost untouched," Ingrid told the Mirror of a recent private lunch Kate attended. "I think she has the desire to eat, but when it physically comes to it she can't." And with that, Ingrid proves herself as respected a lay clinician as she is a social analyst. Long may she rain this stuff over us.

• Of course, the rise of citizen journalism means it would be wrong to limit our celebration of punditry to above-the-line names – so let's hereby institute the search for the royal wedding's most idiotic online commenter. To get the ball rolling, this column would like to spotlight the work of one Varadha V of New Jersey. Varadha is sufficiently exercised to lay the following gem at the foot of a Daily Mail article mentioning that Jerry Seinfeld – what the hell has he ever done, compared with Wills and Kate? – referred to the wedding as "dress-up". "Disgraceful comments from a TV actor whose show and stand-up comedy were the prime reasons many Americans moved away from primetime TV en masse. And the ones who liked his show are the ones who made Charlie Sheen, Lady Gaga, LeBron James and their elk popular." Congratulations, Varadha! You win a brace of elk and the chance to compete at the stupidity nationals. Nominations for your fellow competitors are hereby solicited.