Britain's Duchess of Cambridge was dubbed "Waity Katie" before Prince William finally proposed to her. And the nickname has resurfaced as the wait for her to give birth drags on.

The baby set one day to inherit the British throne was officially due in mid-July, but as the days tick by, boredom, panic and acts of nonsense are creeping in.

The media encampment outside St Mary's Hospital in Paddington, central London, where Catherine is due to give birth, is getting twitchy, not to say restless.

Any sudden movement of vehicles gets the pulse racing.


The scene was livened up Friday when a five-strong group of women wearing Kate masks posed on the hospital steps.

And an old-fashioned, sit-on toy car was delivered, wrapped in a red, white and blue bow.

Royal supporter Terry Hutt was still there, spending a ninth day camped out on a bench decked in Union Jack regalia with some home-made placards.

In Britain's newspapers on Friday, the only baby getting big front-page coverage was one growing up in New York, whose mother claims that former Oasis singer Liam Gallagher is the father.

The Sun and The Daily Telegraph have live streaming video from outside the hospital on their websites -- just in case anything interesting happens.

One reporter from The Times decided to ape Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" video to liven up the "dull" feed.

Valentine Low flicked through a sketch pad with some "Subterranean Babycam Blues" lyrics.

"Woke up this morning/Looked out for some news/There wasn't any/I've got the babycam blues," they read.

"She's late/I hate/The great/Kate wait.

"Is it today?/Is it tomorrow?/I'll drown my sorrows/In some babycam booze."

Low wrote on Friday: "It somehow felt like an epoch-changing poetic performance, a primeval cry of despair expressing the existential angst of the media professional deprived of his very reason for being.

"Or, to put it another way, there wasn't much else going on."

The Daily Mail said "Kate can end the wait with a curry".

"Even the Queen is getting impatient for the royal baby's arrival," it said, followed by top tips said to help speed a baby along.

They included eating a curry, drinking tonic water, acupuncture, getting on her hands and knees -- perhaps by scrubbing the kitchen floor -- or sucking liquorice.

Meanwhile the hospital closest to Kate's family home, where she has been staying on and off, admitted the baby could be born there instead, in an emergency.

The 31-year-old has been dividing her time in the past four or five weeks between her London base at Kensington Palace and the Middleton family's home in the Berkshire countryside, west of the capital, royal sources told AFP.

The half-hour drive to the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading may be preferable to risking the 50-mile (80-kilometre) trip through the traffic to central London.

A spokeswoman for the Royal Berkshire told AFP that in an emergency, the baby could be born there.
"It could be, yes," she said.

"Her parents live locally. Whether she is there or not, I don't know."

The spokeswoman said the hospital had not been besieged by international media, unlike St Mary's.

"We don't have media waiting outside. They did their piece yesterday and they are gone. I think we had a Swiss crew this morning but they are not staying," she said.