On its 10th anniversary, a faint echo of the national hysteria surrounding Princess Diana's death timidly haunts the media. The press don't seem to be quite sure how far to go with this one - in the immediate aftermath of her death there was only one story and the press and public reciprocally whipped each other into a frenzy of pornographic grief. But what now ten years on ?
Now I'm sure Diana was a lovely person and a savage loss to those close to her - but to the millions of Britons weeping into their newspapers she was simply someone they had never met and whose life had brought nothing of lasting substance to their lives.
Diana is often referred to as 'an inspiration to millions'. An inspiration to do what exactly ? Nelson Mandella inspires people to stand up to tyranny, John Peel inspired generations to broaden their musical tastes and start bands, even celebrity chefs at least inspire people to cook and eat decent food - I understand that kind of inspiration but Diana ?
If that seems a little harsh I have an unusual perspective on that particular night - someone I actually knew died.
Just after midnight our phone rang - my girlfriends brother in law had suffered a cerebral aneurysm. He was in a coma. It didn't look good.
We drove the 200 miles or so down to her sisters and met them at the hospital - his wife, two brothers and respective wives were in a private waiting room. Eventually a doctor came in and told us there was no brain activity and that only the life-support was keeping him 'alive' - my girlfriends sister now had to go home and tell four young children that their Dad was no more.
I'd not slept and the long drive and the stress had given me a bad headache so I went in search of some painkillers. It was early in the morning now and there had just been a violent summer storm causing flash flooding. The local soil has a reddish colour to it and the flood waters flowed red along the roads as I walked to a small newsagents within the hospital grounds. I stepped up to the counter and asked for some painkillers, I was just reaching across to hand over the cash when my eye caught the paper nearest me - "DIANA DEAD".
We stayed down there with her sister and kids for a week or so as they tried to take in the catastrophic change that had just happened to them whilst just about every TV and radio station abandoned all program schedules to cover the unconfirmed wild speculation surrounding Diana's death, round the clock, 24/7. This was quickly followed by a wave of national hysteria, terrifying in its apparently mindless obedience to the spontaneously forming church of Diana.
I've never lost anyone close yet and I hadn't known my girlfriends brother in law long enough to feel any real sense of personal loss. But I was immersed in his family's shock and grief and from that perspective, to me, Britain had gone truly mad.
A lot of people said the Queen had made a massive miss-judgement in her behaviour in the days following the accident. They're right, she did. She'd assumed, as had I until then, that the majority of the British public could tell the difference between reality and fantasy, substance and celebrity, genuine feelings and media-driven hysteria.
Imagine for a moment, that scientists had taken a set of Wolf genes, tweaked them a bit, and unveiled this as the result. They would, quite rightly, be driven out of town by an angry mob bearing burning torches and yelling things like 'Frankenstein' and 'Monster'. They'd probably throw a few rocks at them too for good measure.
