The phone rang very early one morning. I got up to answer it. Good news can wait, bad news can't. I thought of my nephew and the new Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and worried. It was my mom phoning me. She asked me if I had heard the news. I told her I hadn't. She said through sobs that Princess Diana was dead.
After the phone call I went back to bed and cried as I curled up around my man. I told him the news. He didn't stir.
Many didn't stir. Many remained perplexed and untouched as the week unfurled with wave after wave of public grief. People cried openly in the streets, crowds queued to sign books in churches, the countries supply of flowers was bought up in hours as people placed bunches somewhere, anywhere, to mark her passing.
The Friday night before her funeral, The Queen was forced to go live on air before the nation in a humiliating act of contrition. The Cities went quiet out of respect. The day she was buried, shops and businesses throughout the country closed. A busy Saturday reduced to apocalyptic streets inhabited by the scattered few who didn't care.
Later, many said that the press had invented the countries grief. The truth was that it was not only The Queen who hurried to placate the masses, but the media too. For years, the press had treated her as some cheap bauble to be tossed around and played with, but suddenly, when they realised her death mattered to us, she was dressed up as the jewel in the crown. They took the countries genuine shock and regret at her death and churned out the most arse-kissing sentimental rubbish. A humbling climb down before the angry villagers massing at the gates with burning torch and pitchfork.
Ten years later, the man who left her for another woman, had to leave the other woman at home and pay his respects to her life in a public arena. He too had sinned; he too had to kneel down apologetically before his country. He is fated to be as humiliated by her ghost as was by her living presence.
It shouldn't be that young Princesses grow to be hounded, and bullied, and sneered at. But we allowed her to be. And when she tried to fight back and take some control, we allowed her to be called manipulative and devious. When she tried to do some good in the world, we allowed them to say that Princesses should keep their mouths shut. When she was killed, the horror was that we could never say sorry. Making them sorry, then, was the next best thing.
In years to come, they will still be telling her story. It started with tea-trays bearing her image wearing her large blue engagement ring, and ended in her funeral car laden with flowers thrown by sobbing crowds. The gods had had their fun and bored of her they brought her story to an end. All we could do, all we had ever done, was sit and watch.
