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BLUE BLOOD About a month ago I wrote to a sanitary towel manufacturer to ask them, tongue firmly in cheek, why it was that television commercials for their product always featured Royal women. As I put it in the letter, 'for Royal women they must be, otherwise why is it always blue blood that we see on the used sanitary towel and not the red blood of commoners?'      This phenomenon has intrigued me for some time, in fact ever since when it was first thought necessary to advertise sanitary towels on television and put people off their dinner. I once asked The Trouble if she could throw any light on why it should be so but she said she had better things to do with her time than spend it thinking about sanitary towels and if I had time to think about sanitary towels it could be better spent thinking about something a little more healthier. Typical.      Atkins Down The Road ventured the opinion that it was probably some sort of perk conferred on Royal women by Act of Parliament as they are so thick that bleeding once a month is just about the only thing they are capable of doing with any degree of success. I must point out though that Atkins dislikes the Monarchy even more than I do and once threw a pot of paint at Princess Margaret, but even so I tend to agree with him on this because try as I might I can't see the likes of Princess Michael of Kent, Camilla Parker-Bowles, and especially the late Princess Diana being able to scare up much of a living for themselves if all they had to rely on was their wits.      Now you would think, wouldn't you, that anyone who thought that Royal people actually did have blue blood would be looked upon as some sort of nutter and treated as such, and this is what I expected would happen to me when I wrote to the sanitary towel manufacturer. That being said I didn't really expect a reply to my letter unless it was delivered by two men in a yellow van with a straitjacket. Imagine my surprise then when I received a reply in this morning's post. The writer of the letter, far from treating me like a nutcase, took great pains to put me right as to what is actually meant by the expression 'blue blood'. I quote from his letter - ...'it is a translation of the Spanish sangre azul, probably referring originally to the 'blue blood' visible in the veins of the fair-skinned pure-blooded aristocratic old families of Castile (as distinct from those with darker skin, of Moorish or mixed race)'.      This is all very well as far as it goes, and has the smack of truth about it, but what the letter doesn't explain is why it is that the blood on sanitary towel commercials is always blue and not red, as it should be. I have written back to them on this point but i'll wager they won't bother to reply.