Though I spent only a small percentage of my time in London covering the royals, I was there for many of the big-ticket events: the breakup of the marriage between Prince Charles and Diana, the Princess of Wales; Diana’s death; Charles’s remarriage; and assorted other occasions of interest and intrigue.

Part of the reason readers gravitate toward those stories, I think, is a latent fascination with the idea of upper-class Britain as a refined throwback to a simpler, more snobbishly hierarchical age — the same thing that makes television shows like “Downton Abbey” and “The Crown” such guilty pleasures. Part of it is that at a time of bewildering change, the Windsors represent reliability and continuity. No matter what happens, there they are.

Also, because there is so little material of any substance to go on, because the public is allowed to see only public events — a princess gets married, a duke gets divorced, a prince gets a job as a helicopter pilot, the queen uses the phrase “annus horribilis” in a speech — we impose on them any narrative we like. We use them as prisms for discussions of privilege, of class, of tradition, of race (in the case of Ms. Markle), of what Britain was and what it should be. We examine them through their sometimes parasitic, sometimes symbiotic relationship with the British news media, which treats them at times as if they were little more than upper-crust Kardashians.

Covering the British royal family isn’t like covering a normal family. You’re not going to get anything out of them. They’re masters of the no-content remark. Their public appearances are tightly controlled, and their activities most days — showing up at charity events, making boring remarks and leaving — are not in themselves raucously exciting to behold. When they give interviews, it’s usually to British news organizations, and always under the most anodyne of circumstances.

And of course they’re not our royal family, so it’s hard to regard them with anything like the awe they provoke in pro-monarchy Britons. (Many Britons, of course, wish they would just go away.) I’ve met a few of them, and I can report that they are much as you might imagine, only more so.