A recent trip to Argentina threw up an interesting case: a ‘journalist’ who didn’t want to be filmed.

I will explain. In Argentina on assignment, I was doing a feature on a high-altitude train that inches into the Andes in the north of the country, El Tren a las Nubes, the train to the clouds. It grinds its way up so high that you have the sense of scratching the belly of the sky: a nice tourist jaunt, nothing contentious.

While filming some of the passengers in my cabin, I pointed the camera at a group of 20-somethings sitting and taking pictures out the window, one of them a blonde woman speaking English with a London accent. The framing was good, with her taking snaps out the window of the barren, dusty landscape that crawled by. A couple of seconds of video of her in silhouette, I thought, and maybe approach her later on to see if she could say a few words about her experience of the trip. So far so run-of-the-mill.

Then a guy she was with got up and told me she didn’t want to be filmed. I thought that was odd, because she hadn’t actually said anything to him at all. If she had a problem, why didn’t she just tell me herself? But what the hell, I thought. Maybe she didn’t want a husband or father to know she was on the train. She probably had her reasons. I grimaced, bemused, but shot around her without any problems. The rest of the carriage was happy to be filmed.

Later, I went to the restaurant car to get some pics of that wagon. The group with the English girl was there, but it was easy enough to shoot around them, so I did. I was amused to see the guy who had spoken to me get up and stand next to the table, but bent over so his backside was deliberately always placed between my camera and the blonde woman. Not the most flattering of compositions, mate. Another in the group, a brunette, lifted herself up and stormed towards me saying the blonde DID NOT WANT TO BE FILMED. I laughed, and said I wasn’t filming her. I also showed the brunette the screen on my camera to prove I was framing the shots to avoid her shy little friend. "That girl is also in our group. You can’t film her either," the brunette snapped, when she saw my camera was catching a girl eating alone at a separate table.

I explained I couldn’t very well know that, nor know that the whole group was camera-shy. "She’s part of our project. We don’t want any of us filmed, " the brunette huffed.

Um, and what "project" is that? I asked, journalistic curiosity now piqued. Missionaries? Diplomats? Definitely not a corporate set.  An aid group? She refused to answer. And at that point, the train manager came up and urged me out of the dining car.  I shrugged, and left. But by now my little reporter alert bell was ringing.  The group had made themselves suspicious.

I asked a member of the train staff about the blonde woman. She laughed. "That’s Lady Gabriella, she’s like the cousin of Lady Diana or something.  From a big family," she said. Ah. Well that explained that. A minor aristocrat used to dealing with British tabloids, so probably a skewed idea of what most journalists do.  London paranoia packed in her bags.

 So fair enough, perhaps. But, no. When I got back to the hotel, I thought I’d check a few things about the railway on the internet, and decided to look up this “Lady Gabriella”. It turns out the 27-year-old’s full name is Gabriella Marina Alexandra Ophelia Windsor, though thankfully she prefers to go by the simpler Ella Windsor. The daughter of Prince Michael of Kent, and 30th in line to the British throne.  Not a minor aristocrat, a minor royal, in fact.

What really got my attention though, and piqued my temper, was that she styled herself as a journalist! Really.

There are freelance articles to prove it, on her website.  One about her opinions on American food ("American food is overrated, unhealthy and revolting"), another about a fashion excursion in Paris (Valentino is a family friend, she so helpfully informs less well-connected readers), another about a TV crew filming meerkat mating habits in the Kalahari Desert ("They can all be as cute as they are calculating, as intent on feeding scorpions to pups as plotting the next illicit affair" – the meerkats, that is, not the TV guys). The list of purchasers of her articles even includes one of those British tabloids the blue-bloods profess to despise.

So: a minor royal, and a bloody cheeky one at that.  Not only does she aspire to be a member of the Fourth Estate. She seeks to deny fellow members the right to go about their job. As it turns out, the photographer I was working with, who went about his business separately, ended up with some snaps of her anyway. And I think the results are quite flattering, in the end – for both her Ladyship and the llama.